Business Transaction Management Blog

Transaction Madness

March 22, 2010 at 6:33 pm Andy Wetzel 2 comments

You’ve been getting alerts all afternoon. Things are not looking good – a failure is likely. There’s a lot of money at stake, so the question is – what impact will this failure have… on your NCAA tournament bracket?

Picking a game wrong in your bracket can greatly impact your ability to win your bet or office pool. A similar situation plays out daily in IT in regards to business critical applications. Hundreds of alerts indicate a service degradation and looming failure. But in the case of IT, where does one look to assess the impact? From a Business Service Management (BSM) perspective, the answer is the service dependency map. This article will compare the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament with BSM challenges that are met by Business Transaction Management (BTM).

The annual NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is currently underway. It is better known as “March Madness”. In 1981, CBS bought the rights to the air the tournament for an average of $16M per year. According to an ESPN Outside the Lines report, in 1999, CBS inked a new contract for an average of $545M per year, which is an increase of ~3300%. According to a TNS Media Intelligence article, the ad revenue for the NCAA Tournament in 2007 was $520M, second only to pro football for post-season ad revenue for US sports. Bottom-line, this is big business. But why does the NCAA Tournament create so much interest and passion? In large part it is due to the way people can analyze, bet on and track the tourney using the bracket.

The tournament is composed of 64 teams broken down into 4 geographic regions of 16 teams each. This year’s starting bracket was as follows:

There are 63 games with two outcomes each (team A or team B wins), which yields 263 combinations of potential outcomes, which is more than 9 quintillion (9,000,000,000,000,000,000). (See more on this calculation at The Math Forum @ Drexel, “NCAA Tournament Possibilities”).

With so many combinations, you never know what can happen, hence the madness. However, there is a map to guide you through the madness – the bracket itself. You can track the outcome of each game and your status (winning/losing) at any point in the tournament. The bracket is living entity for the duration of the tournament and contains only the most important high-level information – who won the game and perhaps the score. (Noticeably absent are lower level metrics such as Possessions, Field Goal %, Fouls, Turnovers, etc.)

In the word of information technology, there are many potential paths a transaction can take in even a (grossly) simplified application topology such as this:

In this example, if you assume all transactions start at the first logical tier, there are 32 (2*4*2*2) possible transaction paths. That doesn’t seem so bad at first, but then consider that each transaction must be considered individually as well. If an application handles 100,000 transaction per day (many applications handle that many per minute) then there are now 3.2M combinations of transaction and path. Even a simple example represents a daunting challenge. This challenge arises precisely by adding the transaction dimension to the application topology. BTM answers this challenge.

BTM adds the transactional dimension to BSM (which is absent from configuration management databases (CMDBs)). It also provides high level metrics (transaction response time, transaction chattiness and transaction specific resource consumption) that combine with the living topology to provide the map view akin to the bracket for the NCAA tournament. This transaction map can be used in real-time to make sense of the madness – which makes it the backbone of outage avoidance and problem isolation capabilities. Additionally, BTM enables proactive capacity planning and performance optimization efforts. Together with the more detailed, domain-specific data and statistics captured as part of BSM, BTM enables better service level management, change and configuration management and more.

When investigating and evaluating BTM solutions customers often focus their investigation on how transactions are tracked (and thus how the living topology is generated). While the methods of transaction tracking are of paramount importance, of equal importance is how the data and complexity are processed, analyzed and managed server-side. The combination of capturing the right data in a transaction context and being able to analyze that data across multiple dimensions defines BTM as an evolutionary step in BSM – one at the center of BSM itself.

Millions will enjoy “March Madness” for the few weeks it dominates the American sports landscape. For IT professionals, every day year round brings new and dynamic challenges. BTM provides the map and analysis to bring sanity to the madness.

Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: Andy Wetzel, BSM, BTM, BTM "Business Transaction Management" "Transacton Management", Business Service Management.