Posts filed under ‘BTM’
What is Business Transaction-Driven Application Performance Management?
By Diego Lomanto (Twitter: diego_lomanto)
If you are in IT operations, or manage business applications, you are probably starting to hear the term “Business Transaction-Driven Application Performance Management“ more often. At OpTier, business transaction management is our core approach to APM so I thought I’d put together a post about what this term means for those looking around the web for more information. Let’s start with a definition:
Business transaction management is an approach to application performance management (APM) that puts the transaction as the foundation for all other dimensions of the APM model.
What does this mean and why would you do this? By taking a business transaction-driven approach to APM, you can uncover the dynamic application performance variations that occur due to the ever increasing distributed nature of tiers in today’s modern IT infrastructure. Your web server is hosted here, but your database lives there….oh wait there’s some interaction with a mainframe that is housing code written in the 70s. Applications no longer operate in self-contained environments – and they haven’t been for a long time. But the increased adoption of technologies such as the cloud over the last few years has accelerated the complexity. You need to find a method of monitoring that can traverse across all of the tiers. And that’s where the transaction comes into play.
Business transactions are both the services our users consume of our IT applications and the singular activity that crosses all tiers to provide that service. And if we could find a way to have that transaction update us on its health and performance as it does its work from tier-to-tier, then we can get the most accurate picture of application performance. That’s exactly what business transaction-driven APM does.
To understand what value that brings to managing enterprise applications, let’s look at the dimensions of APM and how each dimension can be improved by using business transactions as the foundational component. I’ll use Gartner’s recently published 2011 Magic Quadrant for APM as the source and definition for each dimension, which Gartner described as “Five distinct dimensions of, or perspectives on, end-to-end application performance have been assembled by market participants, each one essential and complementary to all the others.”
End-user experience monitoring
Gartner definition: “The capture of data about how end-to-end application availability, latency, execution correctness and quality appeared to the end user”
Additional Value of a Transactional Foundation: The transaction begins here. By measuring application performance from the end user’s perspective, 24/7 and 100% of the time, change-impact analysis shows managers how a certain change at a given time has impacted the user experience providing a rich end-to-end analysis.
Runtime application architecture discovery, modeling and display
Gartner definition: “The discovery of the software and hardware components involved in application execution and the array of possible paths across which these components could communicate to enable that involvement”
Additional Value of a Transactional Foundation: With a transaction foundation, topology maps are derived from the true transaction path through distributed tiers. It is impossible to generate accurate application architecture discovery without a transaction-driven approach. With such an approach not only do we achieve a living topology view of dependencies but we achieve it without the need to model!
User-defined transaction profiling
Gartner definition: “The tracing of events as they occur among the components or objects as they move across the paths discovered in the second dimension; this is generated in response to a user’s attempt to cause the application to execute what the user regards as a logical unit of work”
Additional Value of a Transactional Foundation: The foundational concept that enables the transaction foundation. By tracing every transaction starting at the end user (see experience monitoring above) a seamless view of transaction is achieved from users, across datacenters and into clouds. In addition to providing topology maps, a business transaction approach also measures the performance and resource footprint at each tier that the transaction passes through to give you more command and faster resolution of problems.
Component deep-dive monitoring in application context
Gartner definition: “The fine-grained monitoring of resources consumed by and events occurring within the components discovered in the second dimension “
Additional Value of a Transactional Foundation: A business transaction-driven approach helps IT determine which application components actually need deep-dive assistance. Without it, APM tools require the user to tell them what to look for and where to look for it. This can be extremely difficult with such complexity in the application environment and with so many different people involved in managing applications and infrastructure. Moreover, when the application code changes over time (in today’s agile environment happens very frequently), the configuration of deep dive tools needs to be updated.
Gartner definition: “The marshaling of techniques, including behavior learning engines, complex-event processing (CEP) platforms, log analysis, and multidimensional database analysis to discover meaningful and actionable patterns in the typically large datasets generated by the first four dimensions of APM”
Additional Value of a Transactional Foundation: Once again, using a transactional foundation delivers real-time, cross-tier visibility into the relationships between user actions, application behaviors and infrastructure behavior even when complex business transactions including multi-segment transactions that flow through multiple platforms and locations are involved. As opposed to combining siloed data this transactional approach provides analytics that a far more effective, intuitive and efficient to use to achieve proactive control over application performance.
Source: Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring, September 2011, Will Cappelli, Jonah Kowall
This business transaction-driven approach to APM is what we do at OpTier and we believe that it is changing the way IT manages applications. Hope this helps you understand the term a little bit better!
Gartner’s New Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring – OpTier Positioned as a Leader!
September 20, 2011
By Russell Rothstein
Follow Russell on twitter @RussRothsteinIT
We’re very pleased to announce that OpTier has been named as a Leader in the 2011 Gartner APM Magic Quadrant (MQ) report. This is an important milestone for us. OpTier was the first company to pioneer the concept of business transactions and this recognition as a leader from Gartner is both a validation of our product strategy, and of the dedicated work we have done with customers over the past few years.
To become a leader we have developed key APM products and capabilities including Experience Manager, Business Events module, and Application Diagnostics. Together, they give us a robust solution not only for Business Transaction Management, but for the larger APM picture. To reflect this, OpTier is now positioning itself around “Business Transaction-Driven APM”. This is part of our evolution from a cutting edge solution for early adopters to the new leader in the next generation of the very large APM market in which our BTM platform gives us a competitive edge.
Unlike other leading APM solutions, our solution was built from the ground-up as an integrated platform, unified around business transactions. We’ve invested a great deal in developing and constantly improving our intuitive, visual interface. According to our customers, this makes OpTier not only a powerful tool, but a pleasure to use every day.
I hope you will download the report here to learn more about why Gartner positioned OpTier as a Leader. As a rapidly growing private company we are extremely pleased for this recognition and we welcome the opportunity to show you our stuff. Register for a free OpTier demo here to see our single integrated solution providing:
•Complete visibility into the performance of end-to-end business transactions
•End-user experience management to quickly identify, isolate and resolve issues before they impact end-users
•Application diagnostics for production-class environments provides business-context and in-depth visibility into SQL statements, J2EE stack traces and call methods for faster problem resolution
•Automatic discovery and dynamic mapping of application and transaction dependencies for simpler deployment and faster time to value
•Award-winning CloudFirst for business-centric views of transactions in private, hybrid and public clouds to improve the planning, migration and operation of cloud applications
•Business events module based on a Complex Event Processing engine for correlation and advanced analytics – helping customers achieve real-time intelligence to improve IT and business operations.
Thank you OpTier team and our customers for making this possible.
Follow Russell on twitter @russrothsteinit
September 20, 2011 at 2:32 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
Why BTM Complements APM Solutions
Something that has become clear in my mind over the last year is that Business Transaction Management (BTM) is very different to the popular Application Performance Management (APM) solutions we’ve typically seen in the market place over the last 5 years. I base my opinion solely on an important group of people we’ve come to know over the years as “customers”.
My father once taught me an important lesson whilst he was arguing with a waiter in a restaurant, something along the lines of “The customer is always right”. In fact, it was only recently I used the exact same phrase whilst interacting with the security staff at EL AL airport check-in. After a few puzzled looks, baggage checks, several questions and two stickers I was on my way. Anyway, my point is that customers are generally a good indication as to whether something is good, bad, useful, different or valuable.
In the last year I’ve sat with several Fortune 500 customers who have ALL told me that BTM is changing the way they utilise their APM investments. In fact, two of these customers actually shared with me their IT service delivery and support processes so I could see with my own eyes where BTM and APM were playing a key role towards the common objectives of improving end user service levels, performance and availability. Simply put, BTM was used to identify, alert, prioritise (understand business impact) and isolate issues whereas APM was then used to understand root cause and resolution of these issues.
For example, in real-time BTM could detect a user specific transaction that breached in the application, it could then provide an immediate latency breakdown across all tiers where that problematic transaction traversed. Once the latency is isolated to a specific tier the customer can then focus their APM solutions to that tier and understand the root cause and apply a fix. The net result of all of this is that Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) or Recovery (take your pick) is significantly reduced. One BTM customer dropped MTTR from 2 hours to under 15 minutes using both BTM and APM effectively together.
User’s experience transactions, its therefore important that BTM provides you with visibility of every transaction from every user across every tier so you can focus your APM solutions in seconds to the tiers that are causing issues. When your application spans tens or hundreds of tiers you need to isolate the right haystack before you start looking for that needle.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
