Business indicators are defined in a SOA composite application to identify objects that contribute to the analytical and metric calculations of components. Business indicators consist of the following types:

• Measures

  Store the values of a variable such as a sales amount, an employee salary, and so on. Measures only enable data types that are continuous, and are typically numeric values.

• Dimensions

  Label group or filter measures.

• Counters

  Track the number of times a process instance completes a marked element.

Metadata specified dimensions and measures are captured as part of the measurement.

Business indicators are designed to be sharable and bindable to multiple BPEL processes within the composite. This enables you to monitor their value changes from one process to another when the composite is executed during analytics runtime.