Archive for June, 2009
Awe and Disbelief
Common reactions to Business Transaction Management: How is it even possible? Can it really do what it says on the box?
Continue Reading 1 comment June 30, 2009
Simplicity is Good, Complexity is Evil.
For those of you who read my blog you may perceive me as just another product manager of an IT company. One of my interests outside of work is motorsport and generally driving a car as fast as is physically possible. I’m not the type of guy who drives to work cruising on the motorway in 6th gear doing 50mph (no offense meant for people who do this btw). For me its about getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible whilst maintaining strict adherence to government speed limits…or something along those lines.
Anyway, I was thinking the other day just how complex a car is underneath the glossy paint and metal shell that most people perceive a car to be. You’ve got the engine for starters (literally), then you’ve got things like air filters, radiators, oil tank, fuel tank, catalytic converters, spark plugs, exhausts, gearbox, clutch and so on (I won’t bore you with the other 1842 parts). The car also has hundreds of sensors to detect failure, tolerance levels of components and even stupid people who don’t wear their seatbelts (again no offense intended for people who don’t wear seatbelts). It’s actually an engineering miracle that so many pieces can work together without failure for so long (unless you happen to own a TVR of course). And the great thing is that when something does go wrong your car dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree and tells you what’s wrong – how cool is that?. The monitoring and operation of all those car components is simplified through a lovely glowing dashboard. The oil light comes on when you need more oil, the tyre light comes on when you need new tyres or more pressure. If you drive a BMW then the onboard computer even tells you that your not driving close enough to the car in front like other BMW drivers. In the unfortunate case of an engine light, the problem normally involves a trip to your car garage where some guy in white overalls plugs in a computer to your cars ECU. Usually within 2 minutes he’s detected that your car is broken and needs £2000 worth of work to fix it. Needless to say 95% of issues can be fixed in no more than a few hours (which is why Audi, Mercedes and BMW garages charge £150 per hour labour) 
.
Simple to drive but Complex to engineer
My point with the car is that it’s a simple bit of kit to use and monitor despite its hidden complexities. Car manufacturers have done a stellar job of simplifying complexity so that our cars don’t have 101 dashboards to report status or issues. You turn the key to start, turn the wheel to steer and plant your foot firmly to the floor to go fast. Your car’s dashboard does all the rest to inform you of what you need to know. When the car needs an update the garage simply remaps the car’s ECU at the next service rather than letting than the owner do it himself with a laptop, OBC connection and a hotfix off the internet.
If monitoring cars can be so simple then why can’t monitoring applications? Applications have just as many components and complexity, they are even built by engineers who use keyboards rather than spanners. They even have a nice pretty appearance (unless they’ve been built in the 1990′s with visual basic or something). I know what your thinking “Applications are more complex, nothing can be as complex as coding an EJB or writing some complex SQL”. Try telling that to the folks at Ferrari or Porsche that spend millions each year optimising their traction control and stability systems that stop people like me from ending up in a hedge.
As a product manager working for a software company in the monitoring space I feel a sense of responsibility for putting an end to this complexity of monitoring business transactions, applications, SOA environments, end users, networks, JVM’s, databases, servers, enterprises buses and pretty much everything else that requires several million products, agents , appliances, dashboards and user interfaces. Software vendors should do what car manufacturers have been doing for the last 20 years. They should provide simple usable solutions that abstract over all complexity and make it as straight forward as possible to manage business transactions and the IT infrastructure with which they flow.
1 comment June 25, 2009
The “Aha” Moment of Business Transaction Management (BTM)
When I am presenting BTM to a new audience, they commonly ask “How is this different than all of the monitoring tools that we already own?” Some say “We can already do some of this today with our existing tools.” Many prospects still remain skeptical after value based presentations, demos, use cases and ROI statements. However, there is one moment when the lights come on, when prospects clearly see the power and uniqueness of BTM. This is what I call the “Aha” moment of BTM. What is this aha moment? When does it happen and why?
The aha moment occurs when a prospect or customer first sees the auto-discovered topology of their own business transactions. They now have visibility they never had before. They know where the transactions went. They understand fully what is meant by “transaction tracing.” They can see the overall topology – all business applications and transactions, or a specific transaction such as “Policy approval,” as well as see individual transaction instances.
This new visibility is powerful for the information it provides, but the aha moment wouldn’t happen if it required transaction modeling or data definitions to generate the views. The fact that the transaction topologies are discovered automatically is key to the epiphany. The additional value of capturing the business context of each transaction, the roundtrip and segmented response times, as well as resource consumption finally leads to the statements: “Wow, now I get it – this is BTM. There’s no way I can get this information today. This is the view I really need.”
So why do prospects need to see BTM working live before fully appreciating it? I think this is due to the fact that most people in IT have heard the transaction tracing story before. Either they’ve tried to do it themselves via a coordinated development effort or they have tried to integrate a suite of products together – none of which was designed to do BTM. So now they’re skeptical and gun shy. Seeing the automatic discovery of transaction topology and flow changes this.
For now this initial challenge will remain. It may be a while until there is a better answer to the questions and doubts than: “Please trust me. Let me show you how BTM works with your own transactions. Seeing is believing.”
Add comment June 23, 2009
New business transaction management research announced
On June 16th, OpTier announced that it had interviewed 2,000 UK IT decision makers at businesses of 1,000+ employees across a range of industries, including retail, government, finance, telecoms and manufacturing. The results were significant, finding that two-thirds of IT managers are blinded by complexity of management tools and, as a result, are costing large businesses more than £4.5million annually.
The startling insight was picked up across the UK and brought business transaction management to the forefront of IT news in the UK.
Head over to the press release on OpTier.com to learn more about the research.
Add comment June 22, 2009
Why Every Business Transaction Counts
It’s ironic how I’m writing this week’s blog in the comfort of EL AL’s business lounge whilst my plane destined for Tel Aviv is being fixed (or so I was told 15 minutes ago). Travelling to Israel has been a part and parcel of my job for the past four years and even today I still run into issues (admittedly most of them caused by laziness at the airport). A classic example is getting a hold of Israeli Shekels to pay the taxi driver at the other end. It would be too easy to get these at the AMEX counter at London Heathrow, so instead I wait until I land and use the cash machines at the baggage claim at Ben Gurion Airport, Israel. I mean, how hard can it be to use a cash machine in another country? Answer: impossible.
No cash means no Shakshouka breakfast in Tel Aviv!
I like most people in the world have a cash card. This plastic thing can be inserted into an ATM machine and with a correct PIN I can request money in virtually any country I’m in. Nine times out of ten the money will start flowing but in the exceptional circumstance it doesn’t I hit a major problem. No cash means no taxi and no taxi means no hotel room and no hotel room means I get to sleep at the airport; quite a problem when you’ve just landed on a red eye flight into Tel Aviv at 4am in the morning and you’re begging for that hotel bed.
Solution – give my bank a call. I’m really not joking, I call their support helpline and say “Hi, I’ve just landed in Israel and my cash card isn’t working which means I can’t get a taxi to my hotel”. The bank’s response is initially one of surprise before I get passed through to their fraud department who then pulls up my bank account details and confirms that I attempted to withdraw cash in a foreign country a few minutes ago. They have all the intelligence and data to know exactly why my ATM transaction wouldn’t give me cash. They can identify a risk, isolate it and take action in pretty much real-time to prevent someone who they think is about to commit fraudulent activity and damage their business. Unfortunately for me, my bank tends to be trigger happy when I travel to different parts of the world resulting in my cash card being stopped temporarily. I might be the one in a million customers who has this problem so its important my bank can explain themselves.
The good thing about my bank is that they have a complete history of all their customers transactions (including mine). They know who, what, where and when things were requested from my bank account so if I need help they can see things through my eyes without having to ask me ten thousand questions. They can also give me answers to my problems in seconds like “Sorry Sir, we’ve put your card on hold because it was abnormal activity in a foreign country. Give us 5 minutes and we’ll re-activate it”.
What banks do with monitoring ATM transactions is very similar to what many companies are doing with Business Transaction Management to help their IT departments provide a better level of service to users. When a user calls up the application support team or help desk complaining of issues, IT needs a complete history of that user’s activity and transactions so they know the who, what, where and when. Without this information it becomes a near impossible task to provide answers. If application support replied “sorry we have no history of your transactions”, what is the user likely to think?
23:38pm Flight update: Will have more information in 15 minutes.
Business Transaction Management gives application support and help desk complete visibility into all business transactions for all users across all IT components all of the time. This unique visibility therefore makes it very simple for IT to provide the answers it needs when problems arise and end users are affected. I mean, wouldn’t it be great to know that your website shopping basket transaction failed because some guy in marketing was running a report for the last three months on the same database that your shopping basket transaction was talking to…or that you can’t log onto your CRM system because the authentication server your transaction talks to died five minutes ago?
Managing IT from the business transaction perspective is helping many organisations today provide answers to their users, and more importantly to the business that is looking to improve service levels and end user experience.
00:03am Flight Update: Plane will fly at 10.00am tomorrow morning. Great – thanks EL AL!
Add comment June 21, 2009
Why BTM Complements APM Solutions
Something that has become clear in my mind over the last year is that Business Transaction Management (BTM) is very different to the popular Application Performance Management (APM) solutions we’ve typically seen in the market place over the last 5 years. I base my opinion solely on an important group of people we’ve come to know over the years as “customers”.
My father once taught me an important lesson whilst he was arguing with a waiter in a restaurant, something along the lines of “The customer is always right”. In fact, it was only recently I used the exact same phrase whilst interacting with the security staff at EL AL airport check-in. After a few puzzled looks, baggage checks, several questions and two stickers I was on my way. Anyway, my point is that customers are generally a good indication as to whether something is good, bad, useful, different or valuable.
In the last year I’ve sat with several Fortune 500 customers who have ALL told me that BTM is changing the way they utilise their APM investments. In fact, two of these customers actually shared with me their IT service delivery and support processes so I could see with my own eyes where BTM and APM were playing a key role towards the common objectives of improving end user service levels, performance and availability. Simply put, BTM was used to identify, alert, prioritise (understand business impact) and isolate issues whereas APM was then used to understand root cause and resolution of these issues.
For example, in real-time BTM could detect a user specific transaction that breached in the application, it could then provide an immediate latency breakdown across all tiers where that problematic transaction traversed. Once the latency is isolated to a specific tier the customer can then focus their APM solutions to that tier and understand the root cause and apply a fix. The net result of all of this is that Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) or Recovery (take your pick) is significantly reduced. One BTM customer dropped MTTR from 2 hours to under 15 minutes using both BTM and APM effectively together.
User’s experience transactions, its therefore important that BTM provides you with visibility of every transaction from every user across every tier so you can focus your APM solutions in seconds to the tiers that are causing issues. When your application spans tens or hundreds of tiers you need to isolate the right haystack before you start looking for that needle.
1 comment June 16, 2009
Lindsay Diamond
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Stephen Burton
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Marie-Pierre Belanger
cpennoptier
Linh C. Ho