Author Archive
BTM 2.0 | My Thoughts
Stephen Burton, 29th June 2010
Business Transaction Management (BTM) this year became 5 years old. It’s currently the new kid on the block and has subsequently forced many APM vendors to switch their strategy to focus on a more business centric value proposition around business transactions rather than their legacy of monitoring IT silo’s. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an APM vendor these days who isn’t talking about business transactions and their crusade around “End to End” performance management. From my perspective BTM 1.0 has been delivered to the market and I’m very much looking forward to contributing to the next generation of BTM capabilities, let’s call it BTM 2.0 for arguments sake.
BTM 1.0 in my opinion was about providing visibility of all business transactions across all tiers all of the time to allows customers to manage IT from a business perspective. BTM 1.0 implementations typically focused on a single mission critical application or “business service” (if we’re looking at things from the business perspective) in a production environment where business impact is real and pain is felt the most. Customers who experience BTM 1.0 see things they’ve never seen before, this is why more and more IT mgmt vendors are keen to develop or acquire BTM capabilities. Whilst BTM 1.0 is coming to market nicely I’m already thinking of the future and where BTM is heading.
BTM 1.0 - End to End for an Application
For customers who thought BTM 1.0 was good, things are about to get better as they’ll be more unique visibility on the way with BTM 2.0. Why? Because customers are telling me they want to see the complete picture of their inter-connected business services (and if you’ve read my previous blogs – the customer is always right). The pervasiveness of Service Orientated Architectures (SOA) has been very visible from the customers I’ve been chatting to. Combine the last five years of SOA with customer’s recent consideration around cloud computing and you really begin to understand why complete visibility of inter-connected business services along with their dependencies is becoming critical to IT mgmt. When a business service relies upon another business service or several business services customers need complete visibility of these dependencies so they can understand and manage the business services and business transactions that is really impacting their end user experience and ultimately their business. Without this visibility customers today are managing their business services in a silo’d approach which is fine if youe business services have no dependencies with other business services or they don’t run on a grid, utility or shared services environment. If they do have dependencies, run on shared services or are distributed across data centres and/or in clouds then they’re going to need good visibility in order to manage them effectively. This is where I believe BTM 2.0 will help customers; once again helping them see things they’ve never seen before so they can make smarter decisions and manage IT more effectively with complete visibility of how the business runs on IT. When a business transaction is executed by a user the customer should have full visibility of how that business transaction interacted with other business services and the infrastructure which underpins them. Seeing a complete jigsaw is better than seeing the pieces individually laid out, in my opinion BTM needs to provide the complete jigsaw view.
BTM 2.0 - End to End for the Enterprise
I’m looking forward to making BTM 2.0 happen with our customers, tracking business transactions across one business service is done, tracking business transactions across multiple business services is where it’s now at. End to End is about to shift from the application perspective to an enterprise perspective and I can’t wait to see what topologies we’ll be drawing for our customers over the next 18 months.
Add comment June 29, 2010
APM – Why bigger isn’t always better
by Stephen Burton, May 18th 2010.
I’ve been in the IT management/monitoring space now for almost 6 years. 6 years might not seem a lot but from what I’ve experienced not a lot has changed in the application performance management (APM) market. I glanced at the Gartner MQ a few weeks ago and the same old (and they are old let’s be honest) players were there in the leader quadrant, these vendors being HP, CA, Compuware and Quest. Leaders are normally people I aspire to be like or follow, they should inspire, excite and as their name suggests “Lead”, they should innovate and make the customers life easier. Please therefore excuse my sarcasm while I take a few seconds to think of all the innovation and inspiration these companies have given me…1 millisecond pause…right moving on.
The APM market from what I’ve seen over the last decade was driven from two needs a.) Database Performance Management and b.) J2EE Performance Management. Sure you had things like Road Runners and Profilers but those things were more used in dev/test rather than production environments where pain and business impact were real. And so database and J2EE performance management solutions came to market around the late 90’s with the premise to manage “application performance”. The simple fact is that these solutions were never built to manage applications across the enterprise, they were built to manage pieces of applications (e.g. JVM’s and databases). They became a victim of their own success to a large extent, they were fine at managing up to 100 database or J2EE nodes but they never really provided customers with that “End to End” application or enteprise view. The only end to end view they could provide was the end to end within a Java Virtual Machine (URL to SQL, Servlet to JDBC) or a relational database (SQL to Objects), many tried to correlate J2EE activity with database activity and failed, some succeeded but even seeing J2EE to database calls is not true “End to End” unless you ignore things like web servers, authentication servers, ESB’s, Mainframes, Message Brokers , 3rd party web services calls and other tiers which applications environment still have but are not covered in general by today’s APM vendors.
Yes, many vendors tried to expand their “End to End” coverage and acquired new technology in the space of end user monitoring, synthetic transactions & change mgmt but those solutions were never truly integrated together to make the customers life any easier. The result was a monumental jigsaw puzzle (known as the “APM suite”) held together with super glue and string. These giant jigsaws were put together and managed with professional services and support departments, all of which cost the customer money, patience and frustration. It’s therefore no surprise to learn that these vendors have spent the last 4 years re-writing their architectures to make all the bits work together. The bad news is that most of these vendors forgot about the most important piece of the jigsaw: business transactions.
I recently interviewed around 20 enterprises in the last 6 months for a project I’m working on. The purpose of my research was to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of today’s APM solutions. Pretty much all of the enterprises I interviewed already had solutions from who Gartner classified as “leader”. Therefore you’d expect to hear how APM was transforming the lives of customers and helping them generate more ROI than a city banker (pre 2008). To my surprise the results weren’t encouraging or good, the feedback I got was consistent and almost desperate from a few enterprises. APM solutions were great from a feature and data collection perspective but the physical effort, resource and investment to deploy these solutions was prohibitive. Too many moving parts, points of failure and pieces to deploy, configure, manage and support. Many of the people I met spent more time administering the performance of their APM solution management servers than their own applications! It seems many APM solutions just grew up to be big expensive monsters that were so impossible to manage many customers simply gave up, not because the solutions weren’t any good they just didn’t have enough time and patience to install and configure them across their portfolio of applications. When you’ve got to manage multiple applications across several hundred servers you want to be managing your applications and NOT your APM solution. That is unless you want to work long hours with many sleepless nights.
So what caused this response from enterprises? Well, by nature these APM solutions collect a lot of data to satisfy the needs of the technical people who develop and manage each and every application and database. Everyone has their own way of solving problems which is why you need thread metrics, JMX metrics, OS metrics, session metrics, invocation metrics, JDBC metrics, I/O metrics, CPU metrics, heap metrics, process metrics, SGA metrics, locking metrics, metric this, metric that, my favourite metric, his favourite metric, her favourite metric, my dogs favourite metric and so on. I think many APM vendors lost track of what is relevant when it comes to managing application performance and availability. They focused too much on monitoring application components rather than these things called business transactions that make their customers business run on IT. Customers care about their business, they don’t care about individual JVM’s, databases or other tiers. If the business is hurting they want to know the when, who, what & why so they can make it stop hurting. It’s about time IT was able to feel the business hurting and act accordingly rather than responding to infrastructure alerts, events, log files, exceptions and CPU spikes.
I’ve noticed now a lot of APM vendors talk about business transactions and are moving into the business transaction management, transaction performance management and business transaction performance space. This is a very good thing for customers, maybe we’ll finally see some innovation to help customers manage IT based on the needs and priorities of the business rather than JVM’s or Oracle databases.
Add comment May 18, 2010
Building a next generation BTM UI
by Stephen Burton, 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.
Add comment April 20, 2010
You can only see what you can see.
by Stephen Burton, 6th December 2009.
I read a discussion last week on the internet where a person asked a simple question “How can I get an End to End latency breakdown of my business transactions”. Before I’d even had chance to comment I noticed that two software vendors had already replied with links to their website claiming that they deliver exactly what the original poster was asking for (imagine the odds of that eh? 
).
End to End beyond J2EE and .NET
1 comment December 6, 2009
BTM – the pain relief for CMDB?
by Stephen Burton, 2nd November 2009.
I have yet to meet a satisfied customer with a CMDB. It’s not like I go looking everyday but somehow the subject always seems to arise and people tend to get quite touchy on the subject. It wasn’t so long ago I worked for a company who spent a fortune acquiring an application discovery and mapping solution. It promised auto-discovery in real-time and all those wonderful things yet it seemed to die a cold death months after the acquisition closed. I listened to the sales pitches around “When applications go down the first question asked is ‘What changed’?” and the famous “75% of application outages are related to change”. To me that’s like stating the bloody obvious, of course something changed, if nothing changed the application would be still running.
The problem these early discovery & mapping solutions lacked is business context. They were inherently built to track IT interactions from server to server and technology to technology. They’d scan server ports, executables and protocols to try and piece together the relationships between IT assets within a data centre. Or they’d do it by listening to the actual interactions. They’d paint pretty little diagrams like the London Tube Map and then give you all the technology, versions and patch levels these assets were running. Some solutions were priced per cpu which can be highly lucrative when vendors told customers to put an agent on every server in their data centre. Unfortunately the one thing they didn’t discover or understand was the business services that ran across these IT assets. Applications and Business Services these days don’t just relate to 4 apache web servers, 8 weblogic servers and 1 Oracle database. The pervasiveness of SOA and mashups these days means a single IT asset can serve one or more business services. Applications and IT Assets no longer have a 1 to many relationship, an application isn’t simply a collection of segmented IT assets.
I did a search on Wikipedia for CMDB and found the quote “A key success factor in implementing a CMDB is the ability to automatically discover information about the CIs (auto-discovery) and track changes as they happen.”. If a business service is a CI then that’s a pretty tough proposition to auto-discover and track change on. How do you discover business context from IT assets? For starters you can stop looking at the IT assets for answers, you’ll get your versions and patch levels of Linux but you won’t get a description of your business services that flow through them.
I’ll put my head on a lance and state that Business Transaction Management (BTM) can add significant value to any CMDB project. When you start to monitor business transactions you start to acquire lots of key intelligence on how your business runs and maps to IT. You auto-discover transaction flows and the IT assets they interact with, all in real-time. It also gets better, you can store all this data historically so that you can report and compare business services and their CI’s before and after a change. You can even visualise how the business and IT asset dependencies change over time using transaction flow/topology diagrams as key evidence. When a change occurs on an IT asset you can instantly report whether this change had a positive or negative impact on your business services or transactions by reviewing related latency and SLA. I’m not claiming BTM is the answer to all CMDB pain but it solves some of the most basic and common challenges:
- Auto-discovers business services and their IT dependencies in real-time
- Stores information historically so you can track, report and quantify change when it occurs
Maybe BTM is the pain relief CMDB projects need right now.
5 comments November 2, 2009
Another “Less is More” Blog for ITSM and BSM Solutions
I’m jealous and in denial with several of my colleagues at work. It may have the “compare the meerkat” ring tone but my mobile phone was replaced last week with a new model of berry and I have to report I still feel inferior. It’s like I just traded a Porsche Boxster for a Boxster S, sure it’s a nice upgrade but everything is relative and unfortunately everyone around me is driving a 911 Turbo at the moment in the form of an iPhone.
Still, I’m not bitter. I think the introduction and innovation of the iPhone was exactly the kick up the ass that the mobile phone market needed. Think different is what Apple did and I think many IT vendors today should be following the same type of attitude for IT service management solutions. If I rewind the clock back just 5 years I owned a Sony Ericsson phone to make calls, a canon 2MegaPixel camera to take photos, an iPod “brick edition” to listen to music and a Dell laptop (also Brick Edition) to surf the web and do email. Today, I can get all that from an iPhone. The good news according to all my smug friends is that this iPhone thing actually works and is also quite sexy or something. The fact the camera, ipod, phone and browser are all integrated into the handset with an intuitive user interface is what is most impressive. If I owned an iPhone I wouldn’t need to buy 4 products from 4 different vendors.
ITSM & BSM - Lots of pieces integrated but not the picture you expected.
Now try comparing with what I just said against the IT service management landscape today. Customers are buying ten to twenty point products to manage the different functions and components of IT. Most of which were never intended to work with each other from day one and have so many customisations that migrating to new versions is like moving house rather than redecorating the one you already own. Customers buy separate tools to manage end users, networks, servers, JVM’s, CLR’s, databases, storage and that is just a short list. That’s a lot of GUI, in fact that’s a lot of user logins and products to physically deploy, train and support across your IT organisation. And yet so often we hear the words “Less is More” used in conversation and sales pitches despite many vendors being responsible for most of this huge complexity in the first place. The key issue isn’t so much the number of products, it’s the way in which real users can navigate and perform real use cases to exploit the information across multiple products so they can manage IT more effectively. Dashboards in my opinion do not solve this issue, they provide a quick fix and band aid which is often used by a sales team to try and promote “single pane of glass” views and “OOTB integration” yet in reality dashboards often limit navigation and task orientated use cases where you need to go from high level to low level data using a common context.
We announced a new product at OpTier last week which helps customers understand and manage their end user experience. Rather than create a new standalone product we listened to customers right from the start and did what they asked. We built the new product using the same framework we used to build our first product CoreFirst. Customers get all the benefits and features of a new product but they get it without all the drawbacks of buying yet another product to manage their IT services and components. They have a single GUI, a single data repository and a single user login to access both our products. Customers now get visibility of their end user experience with a complete profile of the business transactions that constructed those experiences all in a single click. We hid the technical complexity just like Apple did with the iPhone and on top of the integration we also decided to make the GUI more sexy in the process.
I may not own an iPhone but that doesn’t stop me appreciating what can be learnt from such innovation.
Add comment October 5, 2009
Business Service Management – well what can I say
I’ll be honest “Business Service Management” as a phrase has never sounded exciting for me. It sounds generic, woolly and uses words that generate flashbacks of my university lectures delivered by people with red jumpers and beards. Needless to say I did some digging recently on the internet and was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of information and vendors who have a story in this space. As you might guess the definition of BSM varies, which is ok until you begin to think “Do I just make up my own definition of BSM or do I work with someone else’s?”.
BSM opinions talk a lot about managing IT from a business perspective. To be honest I haven’t seen an enterprise software pitch that doesn’t talk about aligning the business with IT these days. For me though, the aligning bit is more of a mindset than a killer enabling technology, process or methodology. The way an employee approaches things or thinks has a lot to do with how they manage or work. IT exists solely to deliver a competitive edge to the business that funds it. If every person in IT thought “What impact am I having on the business” once or twice a day then its my belief that the business and IT would be closer aligned, more efficient and more successful. I’ve never been a fan of IT outsourcing for this exact reason – do the people working for a 3rd party IT outsourcer ever think or care about the business they are supporting or impacting? A few do but most probably don’t I’d imagine.
Here we are in a gloomy recession where business performance is all that matters. Huge losses and decreased revenue for many businesses have resulted in cost cutting and a focus on re-prioritizing business functions and services. How much do businesses spend on service X, Y and Z and how much do they make from X,Y and Z. It would be foolish to think that businesses would continue to invest in services that didn’t generate a return. The next bit is then figuring out where all these business services exist within the world of IT. If you’re going to focus on service X, Y and Z and de-commission A, B and C then you absolutely need to understand where X, Y, Z, A, B and C exist and what dependencies they have with each other and the applications/infrastructure that underpins them.
If businesses are going to start changing people’s mindsets in IT then they need to provide them with the right tools so they can start to learn how the business runs on IT. I bet most DBA’s have no idea which business transactions or services are executing against their schema’s these days. You might be sceptical and say why is this important? Should a DBA tune the top 10 slowest SQL Statements? or should they tune the SQL statements that relate to the top 10 business services? This is where BSM technology like Business Transaction Management (BTM) comes in handy. When you can track all business services and transactions across your entire infrastructure you gain this visibility of how the business runs on IT. With intelligence into business transaction latency, resource consumption and SLA across all tiers you begin to see first hand the real impact IT has on the business. Business services have been running across IT for decades, with BSM and enabling technology like BTM its only now IT is beginning to see the bigger picture.
I know it sounds simple but if you work in IT try thinking once or twice a day what impact will you have on your business. If you don’t know then its worth exploring what BSM and enabling technology like BTM can do for you.
3 comments September 9, 2009
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.
1 comment August 13, 2009
Manage IT with Business Impact not with Traffic Lights
I’ve been using the phrase “If everything is important then nothing is important” quite a lot in the last week. In my desperate attempts as a product manager to respond to every email, enhancement request, PRD, conference call and tweet it’s becoming quite challenging to say the least. I’m constantly fighting the battle of email and have even tried sending less email recently in the vain attempt that I’ll receive less…which didn’t seem to work at all. I even tried setting filters up on my inbox but still the emails keep getting through, it’s actually a novelty these days when someone picks up the phone and has the audacity to speak to me.
A typical day for me starts with a latte (and more often than not a chocolate chunk cookie) from Starbucks followed by a quick prioritization session. What things am I going to do today that will have the biggest impact on the company I work for? I could attempt each day to deal with email and tasks as they arrive on my desk in the vain attempt that I’ll keep everyone happy which normally requires working till 2am in the morning each day. Alternatively, I can be smart with how I work and push back of things that are less of a priority or have no tangible impact on the business.
Traffic lights don't always reflect the true business impact
What I go through daily as a product manager is pretty much identical to what operations and application support teams go through each day. Most support teams get email, in fact they get several hundred email or even several thousand emails as a result of the enterprise monitoring solutions they have hooked up to every component of their infrastructure. They have alerts and traffic lights configured for their OS, networks, storage, middleware, messaging, databases and users across hundreds of applications and thousands of physical servers. Customer’s enterprise dashboards turn red and stay red because they simply cannot deal with the volume they receive daily. It’s a monumental task to browse through alerts and put all the pieces together in the attempt that you can identify and isolate an issue before the business picks up the phone and starts asking questions.
More importantly, 99% of these alerts have no business context. The alerts contain technical information based on KPI metrics for a given threshold breach or state, they do not provide any visibility into how the alert is impacting the business. If an enterprise monitoring team receives 5,000 alerts a day how can they make sure they deal with the 3 or 4 alerts that are impacting the business vs. the 4,997 alerts that are just noise?
The answer is Business Transaction Management. When you can manage all business transactions across all tiers all of the time you have total visibility into how your business runs on IT. More importantly you can quantify business impact in real-time by seeing with your own eyes which business transactions, users and applications are experiencing service level breaches. You manage IT with business impact so that you can truly prioritise your teams and resources to deal with the incidents that are most detrimental your business. Gone are the days when your IT support department manages IT with traffic lights based on infrastructure alerts or by investigating each alert as it arrives in the inbox that is running out of disk quota.
Not all business transactions, users and applications are equal. Just like not all emails, enhancement requests and PRD’s are equal for a product manager. If you can’t prioritize and focus on the things that have an impact on your business then the amount of value you’re providing to that business is pretty questionable. In many organizations the business is IT and without IT the business would fail. It’s therefore essential that IT is aligned to the needs and priorities of the business.
2 comments July 28, 2009
Business Transaction Management has Disco Fever
Life is dull when you can predict everything that is going to happen. For instance, I was driving home last week in rush hour on the M4 in the fast lane and in my mirrors I could see a black car approaching quickly. A few seconds later this black TVR Tuscan with big yellow stripes was behind me, pretty cool and a pretty rare sight on a motorway. As the traffic ground to a halt the owner of the TVR pulled into the middle lane next to me and rev’d his engine to prove a point whilst looking at me with a smug grin. The first thing that entered my mind was “Your car’s not going to last long sitting in this traffic mate”. Guess what? A few minutes later smoke started pouring out the front of this TVR with the owner looking pretty stressed. I was laughing and feeling smug also but not surprised in the slightest as the TVR pulled into the hard shoulder in a cloud of white smoke. For those not familiar with TVR sports cars, they are about as reliable as the Windows Operating System with no firewall or anti-virus protection – you leave them to idle and your in trouble.
Today, I can’t help thinking that enterprise monitoring is largely predictable, or even somewhat dull despite servers and applications going up in flames occasionally. For the people who manage helpdesks or application support, monitoring software is about as interesting as watching a set of traffic lights for 8 hours a day. The lights turn red, all hell breaks loose and the blame finger comes out. The lights stay green and you can kick back on Face Book or Twitter and see whose updated his/her status (only joking) or read blogs that describe just how your feeling
Enterprise monitoring needs an adrenaline boost, it needs mojo, it needs to shock and deliver answers to problems that you would never have predicted or guessed. If you can predict or assume why outages might have occurred then it becomes quite boring blaming the same DBA or network administrator every week. When the database is slow everybody assumes it’s a missing index or the DBA hasn’t updates the table statistics for several years. If the JVM is firing OutOfMemory exceptions everybody assumes it’s a memory leak and gets paranoid about finding the irresponsible code without checking JVM memory parameters first like MaxPermSize which will often resolve 90% of memory issues. Another classic example is where a JMX metric shows connections to the database are being exhausted so the first thought is to increase the database connection pool size in the JVM without actually figuring out what’s holding onto the exhausted connections (like slow SQL) in the first place.
Imagine if your enterprise monitoring software provided you with answers that shocked you. Imagine if you were in denial for a split second or even freaked out at the prospect that the solution to your problem is something which you’ve never even considered before. To be shocked you and your enterprise monitoring software first needs to be able to discover new things. The traditional way to deploy enterprise monitoring software is to ask the customer “Which servers/tiers do we need to put an agent on or monitor?”. This approach means customers get visibility into the server/tiers they are expecting their application and business transactions to flow through. The data provided is therefore predictable and somewhat unexciting.
Forget about monitoring servers/tiers for a moment (or a few years). Imagine if you monitored business transactions instead and their respective flows – things start to get interesting very quickly. Wherever the business transaction goes so does your monitoring capabilities and visibility. You begin to discover servers and tiers that you never imagined your business transactions or applications utilised. You begin to learn new things about how your applications and business transactions behave, you learn their dependencies, their interactions and more importantly their contributions in managing your service levels and end user experience. Welcome to the world of Business Transaction Management (BTM).
Being shocked is a good thing
I’ve seen many customers shocked, in denial and more importantly buzzed about what BTM can do for them and their organisation. Seeing a customers face is priceless when you tell them that their business transactions flow from their production application servers to a UAT test database. It’s even more priceless when you here them pick up the phone and describe it to other people in their organisation that real users business transactions are executing against a UAT test database. Its also impressive to show customers their real application topology based on business transaction flow than to keep referencing the partial diagram they think their application actually uses. It was only last week where BTM pointed out four application tiers to a customer that had no idea the tiers actually existed. Shock, denial and then amazement would be how I described that customer.
Apologies to those reading this blog who were expecting references to Disco Funk, big hair, big flairs and the king of pop. All I can say is that Business Transaction Management discovers lot of things that make life a bit more exciting and unpredictable. If everything was predictable then managing IT wouldn’t be fun each day.
Add comment July 20, 2009
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