Consumers are the default Business Transaction Management business objects that allow you to segment transaction performance based on some desired criteria. Mapping messages to consumers is the means by which you teach the system what criteria to use to segment performance information. The mapping process involves your creating a property that identifies the consumer and then mapping that property to a consumer business object. Please read About Consumers for a detailed discussion before you proceed.
Before you map messages to consumers, take a moment and decide the following:
What properties do you need to create?
The consumer you choose must be uniquely identified by information contained in the starting message of a transaction: for example, an ID number or an email address. This information can be contained within a message element or header.
What message element or xpath expression will you use to define each property? (For the sake of clarity, the remainder of this procedure refers to this element or header as Consumer_ID.)
Do you need to customize the consumer business object by adding custom attributes? You might need to do this if you do not want Business Transaction Management to use the default name for the consumer or if you are tracking consumers across different transactions and the consumer is represented in different ways in each transaction.
The basic steps to map messages to consumers are as follows:
Customize the consumer business object if needed to provide additional mapping options for your consumers.
When creating the property, use one of the mapping options described below to map a property to a consumer.
After you complete this mapping, enable segmentation, and send traffic, you can then view transaction performance information segmented by consumers from the Explorer > Consumers view, or from the Analysis tab of the Transactions view.
The consumer business object is seen throughout your environment. Each consumer created manually or automatically is an instance of the consumer business object. You can see the structure of this object in the Consumer's Profile tab. Setting up Consumer Segmentation explains why you might need to add attributes to the consumer business object.
To add attributes to the consumer business object:
Select Admin > Edit Data Model Attributes. The Edit Data Model Attributes dialog box opens.
Scroll down to the Business Object Custom Attributes section and click add attribute.
Specify a Name and Type for your attribute.
You can optionally specify a display name for your attribute in the Form Label field. This name will be used to identify the attribute in the Consumer's Profile tab.
The default display name is the value of the Name field.
You can optionally specify a name for querying on your attribute in the Query Label field. You can use this name in forming query expressions. The default query name is the value of the Name field.
Repeat Steps 2-5 to add more attributes.
Click Apply.
You can map a message to a consumer either when you create a property or when you create a transaction.
Do the following to create a message property to hold the value of Consumer_ID and map the property to an attribute on the consumer object.
Select the starting operation of the transaction to be segmented.
Select Create > Message Property on operation_name.
The Message Property dialog box opens.
Specify a Name for your property.
Specify the Property Source: Message Content or Header, and specify Consumer_ID.If you specify Header, a dialog is opened that allows to specify the phase of the message, the header name, and the data type. If you specify Content, use the Pick from Message link to select the desired message element.
In the Consumer Mapping section, select the Map to consumer through attribute checkbox and choose the consumer attribute that you want to map it to, either the default Consumer Name attribute or an attribute that you created when you customized the consumer business object.
Click OK.