Archive for August, 2009
Putting a Price Tag on BTM
Thoughts on the real value of BTM and why the current ROI models, which are typically based on cost savings, are missing the point.
Continue Reading August 25, 2009 at 11:31 pm Assaf Amit Leave a comment
Business Transaction Management and IT
Recently, leading experts from Gartner and OpTier sat down to look at the challenges companies face in the business transaction management market and the solutions available to address those changes.
Please click on this link to register and view the entire video.
Does change management impact your infrastructure or your business?
I’ve witnessed a lot in IT over the last decade. I’ve seen a DBA blow away (rm -rf) a live production database thinking they were logged into a test server shell by mistake. I’ve seen websites go bang several hours before and even several minutes into major product launches. I’ve filled out many change requests in my time with many of these processed by people who actually forgot to make the relevant changes despite signing off the change requests as completed. I’ve also seen many customers deploying applications into production based on configuration they used in test environments with debug logging enabled. The best one recently was when a security guard accidently locked themselves in a data center room and hit a button thinking it was the door release when in actual fact it was the EPS power button which knocked out the entire power to the data center. We can blame the rise of the machines for our IT woes but the biggest liability by far is still us human beings 
Today, the only thing constant throughout the application lifecycle is change. Building an application is relatively cheap, supporting and maintaining it is where the costs start to spiral out of control. Change requests are an expensive activity, they require development, regression testing, documentation, planning, downtime, backup procedures and an eye for detail. However, when a change occurs how many organisations can truly quantify the business impact?
What exactly changed?
For example, a DBA might look at the top 5 slowest SQL Statements that execute in the database. They might optimise these in several ways by creating a few indexes, updating relevant table statistics or tweaking I/O settings. Various change requests are then submitted which are then deployed in production. What the DBA doesn’t understand at the time is what impact their changes will have on the business. Their database could be serving multiple applications spanning hundreds of business transactions with thousands of users. Introducing a new index on one table might improve one SQL statement but it could have a detrimental effect on several other SQL statements which collectively could impact several key business transactions. It’s therefore virtually impossible to quantify whether changes like this will have a positive impact on the business.
Same goes for an application developer. I know because I’ve been there and tried to optimise many JVM’s with APM tools in the past. I could spend all day knocking milliseconds off Java API calls or playing with container settings like connection pools or thread counts in a vain attempt to optimise the application sitting on top of the JVM’s. You can find 101 interesting things a day to optimise with an APM tool. The trick is knowing which things will actually impact the business in the most positive way. Its also good to know when to stop tuning – the more you change the more you need to test. When your tweaking application code or changing container settings its not that easy to figure out what business transactions your playing with. Again, you might be tuning your JVM’s to make them more efficient but being able to truly understand the business impact of your actions is still a black art. If a dev team of 5 people spends 4 weeks tuning application code and only improves business transaction response time by 5% did they really do a great job? Did the 5% improvement impact important business transactions or did it impact less important business transactions?
Another problem is knowing when to schedule a change request. Many applications these days are 24/7 and global. No longer can organisations rely on midnight change requests. You want to schedule change requests at times with the least business impact. How many users are logged on at this time? How many business transactions execute at this time? Are the business transactions important or can they suffer unavailability?
Business Transaction Management solves a lot of these change management issues. When you capture all business transactions across all tiers all of the time you have full visibility into how each change request or tier impacts your business transactions and ultimately your business. You can also identify the best time to schedule changes based on business transaction activity. When Change Request #5463 was deployed it improved the SLA for several key business transactions by more than 25%. When Change Request #7653 was deployed it improved the response time of Execute Order by 80% but actually degraded the response time of Cancel Order and Check Customer by almost 350%. This is just a small sample of the benefits BTM can bring to change management.
Three Common Questions about BTM
When first talking to people about BTM they commonly have the following questions:
- Who does BTM compete against?
- How does BTM compare to [Insert APM/BSM Vendor Name]?
- Can’t I do the same thing with [Insert Deep Dive Product Name]?
It has been a challenge to answer these questions in a succinct and compelling way, but I feel that I’ve finally come upon the best answers (with a lot of help from prospects, customers and colleagues) that help crystallize the benefits of BTM compared with traditional monitoring solutions.
Part of the reason people ask these questions is largely due to the fact that “the first five slides of every presentation are the same” and “everyone comes in and says the same thing.” This leads us to the answer to question #1 – “Who does BTM compete against?” The best answer to this is “the marketing departments of other monitoring companies.”
The second question is particularly challenging. APM and BSM vendors have broad and feature-rich solutions suites. They have many capabilities and strengths. Most often they are an integrated combination of products that additionally can be used standalone. For example, a typical APM suite is comprised of end user monitors (synthetic and real user), application deep dive solutions (for J2EE, .NET, databases, etc), system and infrastructure monitors, a CMDB, a dashboard, a rules engine and so on. Therefore when someone asks: “How does BTM compare to [Insert APM/BSM Vendor Name],” I give the following descriptive answer. “Look at what the product was designed to do from version 1.0.”
If you look at what version 1.0 of a product was designed to do, it is a good bet that the “v1″ strengths and differentiators remain the same to this day. In other words, if something was built to do end user monitoring in version 1.0, it is an end user monitor. If it was built to be a CMDB, it is a CMDB, even if it got renamed to a PMDB. If was a deep dive solution, it’s, you guessed it, a deep dive solution. The point here is that to do BTM, you need a product that was designed and built from the ground up to do BTM. This means it must be able to track all transactions all the time in production and capture their business context, topology, performance (roundtrip and segmented) and resource usage. If a solution wasn’t designed to do BTM from day one, it won’t get there – at least not anytime soon.
This brings us to our last question – “Can’t I do the same thing with [Insert Deep Dive Product Name]?” The best answer I heard to this came from a new BTM customer. In short the answer is a resounding “No” and here’s why. This (new) BTM customer had at one point asked this very same question. After seeing the transformative effects of BTM on his team and organization, he mentioned he had “finally seen the light” and the difference at a high level was that “BTM is on the wall in the NOC and is used in communication with application owners and the line of business. Deep dive data is never used that way.”
Three common questions, seemingly simple, highlight the differences between BTM and other types of monitoring. I now look forward to hearing these questions as it gives me the opportunity to educate about BTM – a class of monitoring that delivers game-changing value to customers.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
