Business Transaction Management Blog

Three Common Questions about BTM

August 7, 2009 at 5:33 pm Andy Wetzel Leave a comment

When first talking to people about BTM they commonly have the following questions:

1. Who does  BTM compete against?
2. How does BTM compare to [Insert APM/BSM Vendor Name]?
3. 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.

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