Business Transaction Management Blog

I still remember my initial reaction when I saw a GPS device for the first time: How is it possible?  Does it really do what it says on the box?  I was awed by the potential but also suspicious in its ability to work for me.  Living in Israel at the time, I had pretty good reasons to be a skeptic.  Most new technologies are unable to work internationally on day one.  In the case of GPS, the core technology would work practically anywhere on the planet, but without some key features like an accurate mapping database for Israel and Hebrew support, there wasn’t much I could do with it in my specific environment.

When people in IT learn about Business Transaction Management for the first time, their reaction is often a similar mix of awe and disbelief.  They are awed, because gaining true visibility into the behavior and flow of all business transactions has been an industry holy grail for quite some time now, and they also express disbelief, well, for the exact same reason.  How is it possible to auto-discover and track all business transactions, when transactions are not tangible, manageable configuration elements like servers and routers?  At best, such technology might work in a simple, straightforward environment, but our IT environment is huge, complex, distributed, heterogeneous… can this BTM work for us?

Like other emerging technologies, BTM is climbing up a maturity curve.  From just being able to show round-trip response times and infer some latency breakdown of network versus data center time, superior BTM solutions are now capable of tracking transactions deep into the data center, providing rich, granular topology views that cross hundreds of web, application, authentication, messaging, and database servers.  The ability to show simple request-response sequences has expanded to cover complex, asynchronous flows using pub/sub and “send and forget” messaging protocols.  In addition to showing all transactions, some BTM solutions will now auto-discover and show entire business processes, aggregating many discrete transactions into a “short list” of real business flows.  The ability to measure service quality is also maturing from application and server uptime SLAs (remember five nines?) to transaction-specific response time SLAs and Apdex ratings that represent end-user satisfaction in real-time.

Despite being one of the privileged few who witnessed BTM grow from a mere idea into a full-blown enterprise solution, I still find myself sometimes awed by this technology.  It is, after all, an ambitious attempt to visualize complex, abstract business ideas, and manage them like any other assets of the organization.  How is it possible?  Does it really work?  As my friend and colleague Andy previously noted, the “aha moment” for BTM typically doesn’t arrive until after the customer has already seen it live in their own environment.  And that’s when the fun begins.