Business Transaction Management Blog

Sometimes in life the truth hurts. I remember the first time I went to parent’s evening at school and listened to my teachers telling my parents what I was actually like in the classroom. I was seven at the time and it was quite possibly the worst experience of my life… bar the occasion I fell down an escalator in Covent Garden tube station in front of about 200 people in rush hour. School teachers would often say “Stephen is a pleasant pupil for most of the time….however sometimes he loses his concentration and his work suffers as a result.” It was a polite way of basically saying “Stephen can be a total liability at times when he’s not paying attention in class.” The truth was hard for me to take but over time it stopped me being a liability in the classroom and eventually turned me into the nice, pleasant and text book professional I am today (I excelled at creative writing, BTW).

A more composed photo of me at School.

Business Transactions are just like school kids; for most of the time they behave themselves until one or two cause chaos and the next thing you know it’s all kicking off and people start shouting. When it comes to finding out who was responsible for the chaos it’s often an impossible task unless you know what every school kid or business transaction was actually doing at the time. The fact that the majority of school kids or business transactions were behaving is irrelevant if the class or application is currently in turmoil.

Being able to pin point the culprits is often an impossible task when you have to work with data that has been summarised and averaged.  For example, if you’re managing a trading application and a single trade worth millions takes 50 seconds to execute and you’re looking at data that is telling you that your average trade response time is milliseconds then you my friend have had it.

This summarization of data is often a key reason why organisations continue to have issues despite investing several million in Enterprise monitoring technology. The reason for this is that many traditional monitoring vendors focus on tiers. They collect every KPI and metric available for a given tier to ensure they have a wealth of historical data available for later analysis. The problem is that these vendors can’t collect every metric from every tier all of the time, so they resort to sampling and summarization of data to reduce data storage and agent overhead. The net result of all of this is that the data the user looks at is averaged.

For example, the average response time of a Servlet, API call or SQL statement in a tier could be 2.3 seconds. If the average is low then everything looks great – the problem is that it’s impossible to spot exceptions or differentiate response times that are specific to a single user or single business transaction.  A problematic business transaction will often get masked or unnoticed in the mix of similar business transactions that ran fine with no issue.

Today many IT vendors are providing Business Transaction Management (BTM) capabilities that focus on monitoring business transactions rather than tiers. The guiding principle is to track all business transactions across all tiers all of the time providing customers with complete visibility and definitive data. In the same way that a school teacher finds out Billy started the class riot by super gluing Stephanie’s hair to the table you can find out why an individual business transaction ran slow because you know exactly how long that business transaction spent in each tier it flowed through. You can therefore identify and isolate business impact in seconds.

Hundreds of IT professionals week in week out are being blamed for application outages or sev 1 issues. Why? A code red generally means twenty people get on a call and start investigating the network, web servers, app server, database, storage and so on.  They do this without considering what the business impact actually is and what tier is actually causing the business impact in the first place. People still fly blind and make decisions on data that isn’t entirely accurate like average response times. Personal assumptions are therefore made which can often add fuel to a fire that is already raging.

The good news is that these BTM solutions allow you to manage with fact because the data you look at is real, accurate and definitive. It hasn’t been summarised, averaged or lost. BTM provides you with total visibility into who executed what where and for how long. This basically means you have all the facts before you make that code red call and bother 20 people. You therefore slash Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and in the process improve the quality of life for the people who you work with. You’ll blame them less and they’ll spent most of their time on work they enjoy rather than fire-fighting or being in denial every time they look at subjective data from other people.

Stop guessing and start knowing with Business Transaction Management.