Archive for April, 2010
iBlog: CMDB/CMS challenges
By Linh C. Ho
Listent to the latest OpTier iBlog on CMDB challenges, why and how Business Transaction Management can help.
OpTier Chalk Talks
By Linh C. Ho
Check out OpTier’s latest chalk talks on the value of end-user experience management, and the new starter edition offer (limited time only!) of real-user monitoring and business transaction management. The OpTier chalk talks feature product manager Marie-Pierre Belanger and yours truly — moi. Don’t forget the outtakes! :-)
Pages or people? OpTier has redefined end-user experience monitoring.
By Russell Rothstein
April 28, 2010
End-User Experience Monitoring. Real User Montoring. The key words here are Experience and Real. When you are choosing a solution for monitoring the experience of your customers, partners and employees, it’s critical to keep their perspective in mind.
What’s important to your users – pages or transactions? When you are banking online, and it’s taking a long time to view that suspicious-looking check that you supposedly wrote last week, do you care about the rest of the page? The page probably includes more information about your account activity and enables you to conduct additional transactions like transferring funds and tracking automatic payments. But you may not even know what page you are on. Your only concern is the business transaction that you are currently trying to complete – viewing your cancelled check.
Yet most end-user experience monitors track pages or page objects. Pages are significant to application developers, but they are rarely meaningful to users or the business. Of course we need to track information about pages in order to isolate and resolve problems. But in order to understand the user experience, and to triangulate that with SLAs and business priorities, you need to monitor and measure the performance of business transactions.
Part of the problem with monitoring pages lies in the definition of a page. Technically speaking, a page is a URI, a Unique Resource Identifier. But what the user views as a page may actually be a container displaying a number of URIs. When we are monitoring pages, it’s important to be able to track and analyze the page as a transaction – the way the user experiences it – as well as in its component parts. Given all of this complexity, it’s also important to be able to identify, classify and group the page components automatically, while leveraging as much meaningful information as possible. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time manually “recreating” the application your users experience from an assortment of objects and content items with unrecognizable names.
According to one industry analyst, “One of the key goals in deploying end-user monitoring solutions is to move from an IT-centric view to actually realizing how IT is contributing to business goals. The value of end-user experience information significantly increases if organizations have capabilities for translating application performance metrics into business metrics such as lost revenue opportunities, conversions, the value of transactions failed, application utilization, disruptions of business processes, etc.” By using a Business Transaction Management (BTM) approach to End-User Experience Monitoring, you can evaluate your users “real experience” and measure its impact on your business.
Building a next generation BTM UI
by Anonymous, 20th April 2010.
It’s the day after we put the finishing touches to a brand new BTM UI and I feel like I’ve gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s true what they say though, No Pain No Gain. I’ve been on the ropes, been knocked down several times but like Elton John says “I’m still standing”. A new baby is born and its certainly not an ugly one. I am expecting a few tears though when our field organization and customers gets their hands on it and start to shake it for the first time.
To be precise or wily it’s taken 18 months, 125 pages, 50+ detailed designs, 65 flights (most to Tel Aviv), 50+ customer meetings/webex’s, thousands of emails, hundreds of arguments, thousands of beers (5 beers per argument) and a good few hundred bugs. All for the sake of Business Transaction Management. Has it been worth it? Absolutely.
About 18 months ago OpTier made a decision to build a next generation BTM user interface. It was becoming increasingly clear from customers and prospects that the value of BTM touched many stakeholders in the business and IT. Our previous GUI was more focused towards the technical audience being application support teams and application developers. When you track all transactions across all tiers all of the time and provide response time, SLA and resource consumption metrics by Application, Transaction, User, Location and Tiers you end up collecting a lot of valuable information. The problem is how do you show all this information to the right user in the right context? What is relevant for an application owner isn’t always relevant for an application support team or a capacity planner. Showing a technical view to a business stakeholder is like an English person receiving an Hebrew menu in an Israeli restaurant (not good when you’re hungry). Therefore one of the first decisions we made was to make our BTM GUI role based so we could support a variety of users and use cases. Simply put, a user logs in and is presented with a series of “activities” relevant to their role. Each activity (e.g. problem isolation) has a series of tailored views which allows the user to perform that activity using information which is only relevant to that user. For example, a business user is typically interested in business transaction volume, activity and SLA compliance – they don’t really care about CPU usage, tier chattiness or how many I/O operations happen when a business transaction is executed.
The second key decision we made was to make the GUI extensible from both an architecture and user perspective. It’s obviously good to provide out of the box roles, activities and views for our customers. However, the needs of every customer and user is different no matter how hard you try to support every use case. Therefore users can simply create their own roles, activities and views to make BTM information more relevant to them incorporating their own context, terminology and processes. With 13 dimensions (application, transaction, users, locations, tiers, …), 100+ available metrics, 3 working modes, 10 different visualizations (table, charts, clouds, GoogleMaps, …) and a slick graphic design built on top of Flex technology the possibilities to our users are now endless. In the current beta release we support 10 BTM activities with over 75 different BTM views, if users want something different they can go right ahead and create whatever activity and view they wish. Over the next 18 months we’ll be adding more dimensions, metrics and visualization that will help customers truly manage IT from a business perspective, the future is bright.
The last key decision was to outsource the whole usability and graphic design aspects of our GUI. OpTier specializes in tracking transactions across tiers, it does not specialize in designing user interfaces. BTM is our business, usability is someone else’s business (Puzzlehead in this case). I can tell you right now though usability is a political hot potato. Get 2 people in the same room and you’ll get two different opinions on what is intuitive, get 25 people in the room and you’ll get 25 different opinions. You’d be surprised how many times I heard the words “When I used to develop GUI we did it like this…”. As Einstein once said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. When you work with a usability company you’re implicitly trusting them to do the right thing based on your inputs and feedback. Unless your open minded with usability experts you’ll always look to the past instead of looking into the future. What was relevant 10 years ago in GUI might not be relevant in 2010. GUI from my perspective is more art than science, it has to capture the imagination and invite the user to play. Larry Ellison once said “When you innovate you’ve got to be prepared for people to tell you you’re crazy.”
Like anything which is brand new though, we’ll have our issues. I’m not naïve enough to think that our new GUI will be perfect from day one, it’s a significant improvement and departure from our existing GUI. We’ll be able to show more value than we could have possibly imagined 18 months ago with our previous GUI. Our users can access BTM value in a single click depending on what they are trying to accomplish. You want to see your application CPU consumption over time? Click on this view. You want to understand the business impact of the release you’ve just released to production? Click on this view. You want to see the individual transactions user X executed? Click on this view.
I see this GUI as the start of something new and exciting rather than the end of just another GUI project. GUI’s should evolve and provide users with something fresh, unique and exciting. Innovation isn’t about standing back and admiring what you’ve delivered in the past, it’s about constantly listening to what your customers want and coming up with killer ideas so you can deliver that competitive edge to your business and your customers business.
Gartner, Forrester, et al: IT Spending and BTM
By Russell Rothstein
April 19, 2010
It’s no secret that the business transaction management (BTM) market has taken off big time. Whereas just a couple of years ago, OpTier was single-handedly pioneering and educating the market about BTM, today just about every application performance management (APM) vendor is pitching some type of transaction profiling capabilities. The marketing barrage and hype are reaching fever pitch, oftentimes confusing enterprises about what truly constitutes BTM. In a market with inflated expectations, a good industry analyst will help end-user organizations separate the wheat from the chafe and identify the vendors that can deliver the goods. (Whereas the less proficient analyst will focus on creating snazzy yet vapid infographics.)
The good analysts aren’t afraid to ask tough questions and dig down deep into the details of technology, strategy and vision to get to their conclusions. So it’s not without a bit of amusement that we find that the major analyst firms are themselves out of sync in their predictions about the size of overall IT budgets in 2010. Gartner predicts that IT spending will remain flat in 2010, Forrester says IT spending will rebound strongly in 2010, and to round things out, Ovum sees that IT spending will grow only slightly.
And while the analyst groups differ regarding 2010 IT budgets, they all agree about one thing – BTM is growing fast and consuming a larger part of the IT software budget. Forrester has reclassified the APM market to include both APM and BTM, reflecting the increasing role that BTM is playing in managing application performance. And Gartner says that BTM is fundamental because it is the very center of application management.
So it’s no surprise that OpTier closed out Q1 with another blow-out quarter, penetrating into new geographies and vertical markets. Go no further than recent tweets by our SVP of worldwide sales replete with CAPS and lots and lots of exclamation points:
Stay tuned for public announcements of new customer wins and exciting news – we promise to keep the punctuation marks to the bare necessity… (!!!)
Business Transaction Management Puts You in the Empire State of Mind
By Linh C. Ho
Frank Sinatra famously sang how his vagabond shoes were longing to stray through the very heart of New York, New York. If you’ve ever visited the Big Apple, you will know that meandering through its heart is easier said than done. In Frank’s case, easier sang than done. I recently moved to the City That Never Sleeps and while I am blessed with a commute that only involves legs and no public transport, the path isn’t always simple.
Over 8.3 million people live in this kinetics grid called Manhattan and more than 47 million tourists visit each year. My commute from Hell’s Kitchen in Midtown West to Times Square is about a 18 minute walk. On any given path I take, a multitude of incidents can cause me to slow down:
- tourists dropping to one knee for pictures of skyscrapers,
- delivery men and women dragging their racks of dry cleaning or supplies,
- aggregated number of people around a $1-a-pizza-slice joint,
- random arrests at Port Authority bus terminal on 8th Avenue, and the list goes on…
While Business Transaction Management (BTM) provides insight into the complex paths that each transaction takes from tier to tier (network, web server, application server, database, mainframe..), I try to navigate through the city blocks to arrive at the office in a timely fashion. After a few weeks of living in NYC, I can take a proactive approach to prevent the known common bottlenecks—for example; avoiding the daily supply rack on 8th Ave between 35th Street and 36th Street. Another is the obvious tourist trap at Madame Tussauds’ wax museum on 42nd Street where you’ll often find people taking pictures of a very shiny sad looking Nicolas Cage. That is definitely a block to avoid.
By avoiding the known common bottlenecks along the commute, I reduce my Mean Time To Arrive (MTTA) by about 2 minutes. It takes about a minute per block going North, and two minutes per block East totaling an optimized time of about 16 minutes. In the BTM world, think of high volume critical business transactions like stock trades traversing through complex paths from the end-user executing them to the datacenter backend where any latency is a matter of profit or loss. For the NYPDs and FDPDs, any incidents in their path could be a matter of life and death.
In summary, BTM helps you optimize service level performance by tracking real business transactions in real-time. BTM isolates where the bottleneck is as the transaction traverses any given path so the right IT staff can fix the problem quicker. Moreover, BTM provides business intelligence for IT by reporting business-relevant metrics such as the cost of transactions, transaction volume, resource consumption per transaction, end-user experience, business locations and more. This helps IT understand the business impact and gain insight into how to prioritize resolution effort. Add automation to discovering the business transaction flows and their dependencies …and I can squeeze enough free time to check out those Burberry purses!
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
