Business Transaction Management Blog

For those of you who read my blog you may perceive me as just another product manager of an IT company. One of my interests outside of work is motorsport and generally driving a car as fast as is physically possible. I’m not the type of guy who drives to work cruising on the motorway in 6th gear doing 50mph (no offense meant for people who do this btw). For me its about getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible whilst maintaining strict adherence to government speed limits…or something along those lines.

Anyway, I was thinking  the other day just how complex a car is underneath the glossy paint and metal shell that most people perceive a car to be. You’ve got the engine for starters (literally), then you’ve got things like air filters, radiators, oil tank, fuel tank, catalytic converters, spark plugs, exhausts, gearbox, clutch and so on (I won’t bore you with the other 1842 parts).  The car also has hundreds of sensors to detect failure, tolerance levels of components and even stupid people who don’t wear their seatbelts (again no offense intended for people who don’t wear seatbelts).  It’s actually an engineering miracle that so many pieces can work together without failure for so long (unless you happen to own a TVR of course). And the great thing is that when something does go wrong your car dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree and tells you what’s wrong – how cool is that?. The monitoring and operation of all those car components is simplified through a lovely glowing dashboard. The oil light comes on when you need  more oil, the tyre light comes on when you need new tyres or more pressure. If you drive a BMW then the onboard computer even tells you that your not driving close enough to the car in front like other BMW drivers. In the unfortunate case of an engine light, the problem normally involves a trip to your car garage where some guy in white overalls plugs in a computer to your cars ECU. Usually within 2 minutes he’s detected that your car is broken and needs £2000 worth of work to fix it. Needless to say 95% of issues can be fixed in no more than a few hours (which is why Audi, Mercedes and BMW garages charge £150 per hour labour) .

Simple to drive but Complex to engineer

My point with the car is that it’s a simple bit of kit to use and monitor despite its hidden complexities. Car manufacturers have done a stellar job of simplifying complexity so that our cars don’t have 101 dashboards to report status or issues. You turn the key to start, turn the wheel to steer and plant your foot firmly to the floor to go fast. Your car’s dashboard does all the rest to inform you of what you need to know. When the car needs an update the garage simply remaps the car’s ECU at the next service rather than letting than the owner do it himself with a laptop, OBC connection and a hotfix off the internet.

If monitoring cars can be so simple then why can’t monitoring applications? Applications have just as many components and complexity, they are even built by engineers who use keyboards rather than spanners. They even have a nice pretty appearance (unless they’ve been built in the 1990′s with visual basic or something). I know what your thinking “Applications are more complex, nothing can be as complex as coding an EJB or writing some complex SQL”. Try telling that to the folks at Ferrari or Porsche that spend millions each year optimising their traction control and stability systems that stop people like me from ending up in a hedge.

As a product manager working for a software company in the monitoring space I feel a sense of responsibility for putting an end to this complexity of monitoring business transactions, applications, SOA environments, end users, networks, JVM’s, databases, servers, enterprises buses and pretty much everything else that requires several million products, agents , appliances, dashboards and user interfaces. Software vendors should do what car manufacturers have been doing for the last 20 years. They should provide simple usable solutions that abstract over all complexity and make it as straight forward as possible to manage business transactions and the IT infrastructure with which they flow.