Another year ending with the Annual Gartner Data Center show in Las Vegas! This show has grown quite a bit since I first attended almost a decade ago. I believe over 2500 attendees this year roamed around the Caesars Palace with name badges hanging on the belly—some camouflaged with the fans of the National Finals Rodeo.

This year, the hot topic was not only cloud computing but seems there were a lot of discussions around DevOps and analytics. Other topics of interest included Application Performance Monitoring (APM), End-user Experience (EUE), Business Transaction Management (BTM), Big Data and many more around IT operations.

Take a gander (something like that) at the few bits and bites I picked up, particularly found the polling questions interesting to share.

Poll: what is the biggest reason ITOps group isn’t doing more innovation?

• 41% too busy with day to day operations
• 27% politics
• 11% cultural
• 9% feel they are very innovative
• 7% not a priority
• None or others

Not surprising. When IT is too busy with day to day operations like keeping the lights on, and expensive resources are stuck on a conference bridge figuring who is accountable to fix the problem; of course there is no time and resources put into innovation. Only when IT is proactive and preventive to issues that innovation has a spot on the agenda. Though, 9% feel very innovative (innuh-vaaa-div as rodeos would say) :-)  – I’d be interested in hearing from this 9% to understand what they are working on! Innovation clearly brings new ideas that drive change and create value that can only enable better business outcomes. If you’ve had a positive change in business outcome due to innovation; please do share!

Poll: what is your top priority for availability and performance tool investment for the coming budget year?

• 26% APM
• 21% ECA
• 14% SLA
• 7% Virtualization
• 7% Server Monitoring
• 5% Network Monitoring
• 2% BSM
• 2% Cloud

Indeed APM is hot again, though this is referring to ‘new APM’ which is above and beyond the traditional deep-dive tools. One of the analyst cautioned about using last millennium’s tools to solve today’s problems! Deep-dive is only a slice of five dimensions of APM according to Gartner. Gartner did publish a 2011 APM Magic Quadrant which seven vendors were positioned in the leader’s quadrant (and meeting all five dimensions): OpTier, CA, Compuware, HP, IBM, Opnet and Quest. If you’re in the 26%, here’s a complimentary copy of the APM report.

APM inquiries according to the analysts seem to have increased by over 50% compared to last year. Within APM, end-user experience and business transaction profiling are touted the two hottest topics.

Event Correlation Analysis (ECA) is second to APM, beyond ECA but somewhat related, we see customers looking to apply analytics for both IT and business operations. Approaches such as multi-dimensional OLAP (online analytical processing), CEP (complex event processing) and log analysis are commonly seen. Log parsing and analysis comes up for those looking to parse log files to assist with trouble-shooting primarily. Bringing intelligence through the likes of CEP helps IT elevate its awareness of business impact, prioritization and prevent abnormal behaviors in both IT and business operations. Multi-dimensional OLAP helps bring different perspectives easily and quickly for problem isolation, impact assessment, resolution, optimization and more. For example one can view service levels by business transactions, by users, by applications or flip it around to get resource consumption by applications, users, and transactions—think of a rubik’s cube for IT management.

These all borrow business intelligence concepts for the world of IT management – which is not a bad thing when the ultimate goal is aligning IT and the business.

I am surprised to see only 2% cloud for the next coming year, perhaps the audience weren’t sure what Gartner meant by ‘cloud’ as it could be different extremes of initiatives. Or simply, the audience still isn’t quite ready. Lastly, I can’t say I am surprised to see 2% BSM (Business Service Management); this term has been nebulous for quite some time and since the last pure-play BSM vendor was picked up by Novell — we’re not hearing much from that corner.

DevOps surfaced quite a bit, here’s a couple of interesting polls.

Poll: Is your organization leveraging DevOps?

• 62% have not heard of DevOps before
• 11% aware of DevOps but not planning to use it
• 9% experimenting – not in production
• 8% using for both critical and non-critical apps
• 7% considering using DevOps in next 12-14 months
• 3% using it for non critical apps

This was a surprise – 62% have not heard of DevOps? To defend it, bridging the gap between dev and ops; we’re just not there yet. The reality is more “OpsDev” – how to help IT operation guys bring factual data to the Dev guys to fix issues that are causing pain in production. IT operation needs to be proactive at crossing over that wall. This can only improve productivity, communication and eliminate the traditional siloed approach. There is still some work to do here to break the great wall.

Poll: what process is most in need of being addressed via Devops?

• 36% Release management
• 35% Change management
• 12% performance management
• 12% capacity management
• Others

Not shocking. Change and release management are key processes to address via DevOps – how often do changes cause performance problems? Do you understand the change impact on your end-user experience, critical business transactions, application performance? Effective change and release processes can only be achieved with solid collaboration between dev and ops to minimize application rollbacks, improve quality releases and reduce risks of impacting performance.

Finally, kudos to the Gartner analysts for the informative sessions, one-on-ones, dinners and drinks – they’ve gone the extra mile for attendees and vendors! Usually Gartner will have a write up on the Data Center poll results the following spring; buckle up! it will be interesting to see what they make out of all this!

Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season!

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.

Analytics

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!

Follow on Twitter: linh_ho_nyc

OpTier’s marketing team spent a morning with our cameraman outside the office asking passersby in Times Square what they think Application Performance Management (APM) means, what they do when they experience a poorly performing application/website, why they think there is such problems, — let me just say that for a fun video, we quickly realized that today’s end-users are savvier than we think!

We interviewed about 40 people on the street and gathered some interesting statistics around end-user experience, application performance and business transactions.

Check out the two street interviews!

What is Application Performance Management? (duration 1:50) >>

Poor application performance from your end-users perspective (duration 4min)>>

Linh

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

A recent visit to a customer site demonstrated how OpTier BTM can be a valuable complement to the load testing process. For the past several years, our customer, a large manufacturer, has been using OpTier BTM to reduce rollout risk as new patches and functionality are released into production.

On this occasion, the QA team had planned four different load tests designed to ensure that changes made to the backend system had improved, rather than degraded performance as expected. An hour and a half into the first load test, OpTier BTM detected a spike in the execution time of two transaction types – Order Item and Add Order. OpTier BTM showed that during the spike, there were several instances of the problematic transaction running concurrently. This was reported to the team, along with instance data showing the exact time the spikes were detected.

OpTier BTM clearly shows the sudden spike in the elapsed time of the Order Item and Add Order transactions:

The transaction had a typical end-to-end execution time of approximately 5 seconds. By drilling down into the transaction instances, we saw that during peak load, there were several instances running at once, and they were each running for over 3 minutes:

OpTier BTM was critical to enable a quick analysis of the source of the problem. In just two clicks it demonstrated that the problem was a deadlock issue within the EJB layer. OpTier BTM also showed what was not problematic so that the team would not waste time on the parts of the application that were working well. It showed that the WebSphere Commerce Suite side of the application performed within acceptable ranges, including the DB2 calls. It also showed that the load balancing between the 2 WebSphere servers appeared to be functioning properly. The customer used (and continues to use) OpTier BTM not only to measure transaction performance, but also to gain insight into the part of the transaction that was causing the slowdown, and the root cause of the problem.

By using OpTier BTM during the load testing process, our customer was able to drill down from a broad view of the overall system performance to a specific analysis of the individual transaction instances that were performing poorly.  As a result, the application developers were able to understand the circumstances and root causes of the performance degradation and to resolve them rapidly.

A recent incident at a customer site illustrates how OpTier BTM can play a crucial role in detecting, isolating and remediating performance issues before business-critical services are severely affected.

At a large UK bank, OpTier BTM is used to monitor the central internet banking application. With 4 million business customers using the bank’s site, OpTier monitors over 40 million transactions every day. During a recent Friday morning, OpTier BTM detected a marked increase in application response times as well as a large number of errors. It was absolutely critical to address the issue right away, because not only was it the peak time of day, it was also the last Friday of the month – payday for many people – and the last work day before a 3-day bank holiday weekend.

As you can see in the graph above, OpTier BTM showed an increase in average service time (the blue line) and errors (black area) after 9:50 am. Because the timing was so critical, the bank decided to switch over to their remote contingency data center. As you can see in the graph, the performance improves after 10:50 when switch was made. Even after the switch, we still see some errors because a public-facing internet application it is constantly hit by incorrect URLs – from end user typos to automated Trojans and hack attempts.

While the failover was taking place, the team used OpTier BTM to isolate the cause of the problem. In the graph below, the OpTier dashboard shows a marked increase in service time for User Identification and Verification database calls from the application server. Since nearly every transaction in the application makes a call to this database – even after the user is logged in – nearly all application functionality was affected by the slowdown.

In the drill-down to an individual transaction instance, we can see that calls to the identification and verification database were taking almost 2:30 minutes to perform.

When we drill down into the topology of another transaction instance, we can see that there is a very large Inter-tier time of 1:41 between Apache and WebSphere, indicating a communication problem. This behavior is usually an indication that the WebSphere resource has been exhausted while waiting for backend availability. This would be a secondary effect of the slowdown of the database service.

With the information provided by OpTier BTM, the bank was quickly able to identify that the source of the problem was in the database, resulting in very fast problem resolution and preventing an all hands call that would have wasted valuable time for all of the silo teams (i.e. not only DBAs but also architects, Java developers, network teams, and representatives from other IT silos). The bank’s DBA quickly pinpointed the source of the problem using OpTier BTM data – one of the nodes in their database cluster had reached its session limit. Without OpTier BTM, even isolating the problem would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Thanks to OpTier BTM, the problem was identified, addressed and resolved as efficiently as possible. Customers were able to deposit their pay and – along with the bank’s support teams – enjoy the holiday weekend.

May 12, 2011

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance is an important consideration for thousands of companies and an integral part of their network security strategy. But what about application performance monitoring? You need to make sure that APM, BTM and other monitoring tools are PCI DSS compliant as well.

Recently, a customer approached us about monitoring an application that executes over a million financial transactions per day. The users of the BTM system are application owners and performance specialists that need an end-to-end perspective on all of the business transactions in the application. In this case, the need is especially critical because the system was developed by a different team which is no longer at the company.

The current team needed to be able to manage the performance of business transactions, without exposing sensitive customer information to unauthorized individuals. They were aware of this issue because other monitoring tools in their environment, from respected vendors, also captured protected customer data and did not provide a mechanism for removing it – resulting in a potentially serious compliance issue.

OpTier BTM features a  solution for PCI DSS compliance that scrubs transactions of sensitive data. It masks protected personal information, while leaving the rest of the transaction, which is useful for problem solving, intact. This mechanism is very simple to implement and saves the customer from having to implement a more costly solution for maintaining compliance, such as auditing all BTM users for application access and/or moving the database to a tighter security zone.

Below is an example of how the data would appear without the PCI DSS compliance feature. (The credit card number is circled in red and some of the digits have been blurred.)

And here is an example of a similar transaction with the PCI DSS solution installed. The credit card number is masked, along with names, addresses, and other protected information.

After installing the mechanism, our customer has all of the information they need in order to manage performance and ensure SLAs – while maintaining compliance with the payment card industry standard.

Retailers are quickly realizing the value of adopting technologies that provide insight and analysis of their customers’ behaviour and experience. The most recent example, smartphone applications which allow major retailers to track and offer promotions to shoppers as they walk from outside the store, to counters, to cash registers and even inside the dressing room. Every move gives the retailer more information and insight. 

While there’s no ignoring the value of a technology that provides a new generation of intelligence and agility, the 100’s or even 1000’s of transactions taking place with a customer’s every move can strain a retailers IT infrastructure and impact transaction response times and ultimately the business bottom line. According to a leading analyst firm, a key growth area for 2011 is retailers looking to upgrade e-commerce platforms, multichannel infrastructures and application strategies so they can deliver a seamless cross-channel shopping experience across touch points. In order for these applications, transactions (and mobile applications) to run smoothly and ensure the legitimacy of each and every transaction, retailers need to consider a new generation of technology.

Enterprise systems monitoring solutions have done a great job providing key metrics related to the individual silo, for example server CPU, memory or network bandwidth and uptime. However, these monitoring tools often fail to detect application problems felt by the user community and IT continues to rely on the end-users to call the helpdesk for problem notification. Moreover, these silo monitoring solutions do not provide the business context and intelligence that IT needs to run like a strategic business unit. As the business demands become more sophisticated, so should the requirements for IT management technologies. The reality is IT infrastructures are part of the retail DNA!

The latest trends have been to adopt a combination of Complex Event Processing (CEP), Business Transaction Management (BTM) and End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM).  Take CEP for example, the goal of CEP is to provide situational knowledge and awareness to help the users to accurately sense and respond to business needs. CEP does this by correlating and processing the complex events (IT or business events) to help a business understand any business operational abnormality. For example, CEP can monitor and determine when the stock levels for the book “The King’s Speech” are within 10 percent of the minimum stock level given the last 10 hours of buying behaviour and send an event to begin the re-stocking process to the distribution center.

CEP alone isn’t enough for IT management. Combining CEP with the rise of BTM and EUEM, which captures transactions executed by end-users across an organization, has allowed more companies to gain real-time quantifiable business impact that IT needs. For example: how many transactions and which channels have been impacted, what is the total revenue loss, which regional customers are impacted, where is the bottleneck in the business process, was there a security breach by a user?

BTM with a CEP engine brings together events impacting business transactions, processes, activities and customer experience. This sophisticated combination is an ideal technology for retail organizations that want intelligent and agile ways to sell products and services to customers—plus provides IT with a reliable infrastructure to back it up. BTM provides the end-to-end transactions flow perspective, so it ensures that when any problems are detected, the right IT staff can fix the problem immediately without losing sight of any transaction.

The EUEM on the other hand, known for detecting application performance problems, provides the customer experience perspective. EUEM provides an understanding of the impact on the end-users experience no matter what location they may be. 

A powerful combination of BTM, EUEM and CEP would give critical perspectives to IT management:

• A real-time transaction-centric service model to show all transaction relationships with their supporting IT infrastructure components
• Visibility of all business transactions and transaction flows
• Transaction and application diagnostics for quick root cause of problems
• End-user experience and behaviour perspective
• Business operations and processes perspective with intelligent analytics

 These perspectives give retailers a better understanding of events as they happen, enabling them to be more clever and focused in how they engage with customers.

The faster a retailer can respond to shopping pattern changes and customers’ behavior, the more competitive it is and thus the more money it makes. Retail is an industry area in which these critical perspectives can be particularly effective for the IT organization and even the line of business managers. Information about promotions such as daily-deals like Groupons and Living Social, prices, competition, stock availability, and locations only give customers greater control of the shopping process. Retailers continue to face the competitive pressure and need to be ahead of their game.

Retailers that harness new generation technology that provides critical business-centric perspectives are able to gain real-time insight, not only into their business transactions and end-users experience, but also into the complex patterns within their IT infrastructure. Moreover, such solutions typically give retailers an easy way to understand any change impact on the users, the business and the IT infrastructure. For example, retailers can compare between two time periods for a before and after effect of any given promotion or campaign.

This allows retail organizations to be more responsive to the market, make better informed decisions and ultimately are more successful.

This week I spent a morning at the NYSE with a number of investment bankers. When talking to banking technologists, some of the top priorities are customer experience, global platform, innovation and regulations/compliance. In this blog, I want to focus in on compliance specifically the new Basel III.

Critics have not been kind to Basel III. While few will argue that championing greater visibility and tighter regulation of liquidity controls is a bad thing.  It’s widely believed that the legislation lacks teeth and is, in truth, a fairly weak ‘knee jerk’ reaction to the economic crisis. Regardless of sideline criticism, implementation of the legislation in some form will be vital to the future of the banking system. In practice, it is potential confusion around the cross over between Basel II and III that will be the real sticking point.

The fact is, even if analysts and banks do come around to the new legislation ideals, they are likely to have trouble implementing the processes effectively within their current IT environment. As Alison Ebbage noted in her recent article for FST, one of the key challenges that banks face in their drive towards Basel III, is fragmented and siloed IT infrastructures. The article noted that this can make things cloudy in terms of generating a holistic view of events happening across trading platforms. This poses a significant operational risk to banks.

In terms of mitigating unforeseen risks, the onus is still very much with the banks to ensure that their internal processes and failures don’t let them down. In particular, The Accord specifically cites business disruption, data loss and security breaches arising from system failure as events that banks need to protect themselves against. As these processes are very much enabled by technology, IT needs to ensure its got its own back.

If banks are to enforce the latest legislation, simplifying these complicated IT landscapes will be the key to success, but it’s certainly a tricky business. For years banks have invested in sprawling systems, adding more and more layers as they were needed. In this situation, identifying how, why and where an IT problem has occurred is arduous, time consuming and expensive. With a complicated mismatch of systems and pressure to implement new regulations, I’d bet my bottom dollar that most IT managers wish they could clear out their IT cupboard and start again.  So, with operational risk a much overlooked – yet pivotal – part of Basel III, what’s a bank to do?

Flipping IT management on its head is a good starting point. Rather than thinking about individual application systems and how they’re performing, banks need to generate an end-to-end view of all business transactions in real-time. Transactions touch multiple applications, IT services, business services and possibly run in and out of the cloud. Banks need a way to tag and track the transaction flow to ensure there is absolutely no blindspots. Moreover, when regulators and auditors require historical reports on systems performance and reasons for losing sight of transactions–it is IT that will have to generate them.  Traditionally this hasn’t been possible because IT management has been just as siloed as the systems it monitors. Because of these siloes, blindspots have been created for IT, making it harder for IT to quickly find and fix problems. This situation has made it very difficult to avoid downtime or application slowdown. Steering clear of these potential threats is crucial in order to reduce risk, which in turn makes it easier to monitor compliance processes. If comprehensive records of IT performance are the norm, potential areas of risk can be readily identified and acted upon. By ensuring these records are in place and are constantly updated, the humble IT department will become recognised as a vital, reliable and valuable business unit.

March 7, 2011

We’re proud of the fact that OpTier software powers a variety of critical businesses. Every day OpTier BTM ensures that stock trades execute fast, national train lines keep on schedule, billion dollar procurement systems don’t fail, online bill payments are executed properly, mobile phone service plans are provisioned, and insurance claims are processed. And while it’s not as sexy, we also ensure that citizens are able to pay their taxes on time by managing tax return filing systems.

Our customer, a large, national tax authority, is responsible for collecting all online tax submissions each year. Since few of us prepare our tax forms in advance, it comes as no surprise that most of its traffic arrives in one giant peak just before the deadline.  In fact, more than 80% of its annual traffic occurs during those 3 weeks, and 10-15% of the traffic occurs during the final 8 hours! Of course the annual peak is extremely stressful for the IT department, and in the past, there have been some painful system failures that resulted in submission delays.

This year, (we’re happy to report,) the annual peak was scaled successfully. Our customer used OpTier BTM to monitor all of the key servers, and during the final day, it was processing nearly 5 million transactions per hour.  These transactions are exceptionally complex, with over 200 tiers, and OpTier BTM discovers them all automatically, which is important, since there are changes every year.

During the peak, a customized OpTier BTM dashboard is displayed on a 50” plasma monitor at all times. Around 50 people man the command center 24/7 during the peak, and OpTier BTM is always in focus.

The SOA architecture is developed by a number of different application teams and vendors, so the ability to identify where a problem is occurring and put the resolution into the hands of the correct team is absolutely essential – it saves everybody a lot of finger-pointing and arguing over who’s holding the ball. For example, in the cut-out from the dashboard below, the red block shows a slow-down in the performance of the back-end services. By isolating the problem, OpTier BTM can reduce the time spent on troubleshooting by as much as 90%.

Needless to say, the business impact of any outage is enormous for the authority, the vendors, and the public. So the ability to identify and resolve problems quickly is crucial.

OpTier BTM repeatedly identified significant slow-downs much sooner than other monitors, and proactively identified several different types of incidents. The team also used OpTier BTM to drill down and isolate problems. In more than one case, OpTier BTM was used to halt an all-hands call, and to identify both short-term and long-term solutions.

While OpTier BTM complemented the other monitoring tools in the data center, the team appreciated its business focus and the ability to understand the user impact of IT issues. Where other monitors each showed one piece of the puzzle, OpTier BTM captured the entire picture. To quote one of their operations managers, “We need this stuff! We should be using it to monitor other applications as well. ”

“OpTier, the company that ensures you pay your taxes on time.” As true as it is, we’ll have to mull that one over again as a company slogan…