About business journeys

Business Journeys in Splunk Observability Cloud allow you to track and visualize end-to-end business processes by correlating technical telemetry data with key business milestones.

In complex, distributed environments, technical metrics like service latency often fail to provide a complete picture of how a business process is performing. Business journeys bridge the gap by mapping distributed traces and spans to specific steps in a business workflow.
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Overview

A business journey is a visual representation of a multi-step process that may span multiple microservices and timeframes. By defining specific "milestones" within your incoming trace data, you can transform raw technical events into a structured timeline that reflects the state of your business operations, and focus on the successful completion of user objectives.

Use cases for business journeys

Business journeys enable both technical and non-technical stakeholders to understand the impact of system performance on business outcomes. Key benefits include:

  • Visibility into process health: Identify where users are dropping off in a workflow or which step is causing the most significant delay in a transaction.
  • Align business and IT departments: Use common Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)—such as conversion rates or total processing time—to facilitate communication between DevOps teams and business owners.
  • Proactive bottleneck detection: Monitor the duration between milestones to identify "slow" steps before they result in a complete process failure or a degraded customer experience.

Key concepts

To effectively use business journeys, it is important to understand the following concepts:

  • Milestones: Specific points in a journey that represent a completed action (e.g., "Payment Validated"). These are mapped from existing spans or attributes in your trace data.
  • Journey duration: The total time elapsed from the first milestone to the final milestone.
  • Attributes: Metadata (such as "Customer Tier" or "Region") attached to the journey that allows you to filter and group your business metadata attached to your milestones for deeper analysis.

Create a business journey

Once you identify the business process you want to track, create a business journey by automatically discovering the journey or manually creating a journey. To learn more, see Create a business journey.