Functional

Cross tier transaction tracking and monitoring

? Track and monitor transactions as they traverse the different infrastructure tiers.

? Track and monitor end user experience

? Support not just application processing tiers, but also databases and other middleware, as customers experience shows that they are often the cause for performance problems

? Give an end-to-end view of every transaction with performance data for every tier the transaction runs on in real time

? Quickly identify the problematic transaction and tier

? Assure all problems can be quickly identified and associated with a specific tier

? Identify any issues directly related to end user experience

? Reduce time to problem resolution

? Reduce finger pointing

? Provides a single solution that could be used by different groups (J2EE, DBAs, BUs, operations managers, etc.)

? Eliminate the need for a large SWAT team. The problem resolution team can be reduced to only those associated with the identified problematic tier.

Identify transactions by user, IP address, transaction type, and location

? Identify all users and geographies impacted by a performance problem (for all incidents)

? Identify usage levels and trends by types of transactions and users

? Quickly identify which users and geographies are impacted by a performance issue and react accordingly (such as contact all impacted users before they complain etc.).

? Understand usage trends to better align expectation with business.

Monitor all transactions and their SLAs as they traverse the different tiers

? Identify every transaction instance and track it through its actual flow – in real time.

? Monitor all transactions all of the time - not a sampled subset.

? Monitor transaction behavior against thresholds for alerting

? Aggregate transaction flow information for analytics over time

? Proactively avoid outages

? Quick identification of performance problems

? Reduce time to problem resolution – pin pointing the problematic tier

? Complete visibility – ability to monitor all transactions assures no problem will go unnoticed

? Capturing data from all transactions removes ambiguity from fault isolation.

? Performance issues can be quickly associated with the problematic tier

? Side effects of non critical activity can be identified

Monitor the end user experience

? Monitor all real transactions from all users, in real time

? Provide network data and correlate it to end user transactions as well as to entire applications

? See a seamless view of the end users experience and the transactions performance across all tiers for every transaction

? No dependency on unrealistic synthetic transactions

? Ability to understand client server round trip time including time spent outside the datacenter, for every single transaction

? Provide data on problematic network situations to technical team in the context of business transactions and end user experience such as:

o TCP errors

Redirect times

o Transfer size

o Bandwidth usage

o Server vs. Network time

Record transaction resource footprint across all tiers

? Identify resources consumed by different transactions at each tier they traverse through

? Provide transaction based metrics specific to the application

? Important for problem diagnostics – reduce time to problem resolution

? Critical to supporting business driven capacity planning

? Provides better visibility regarding infrastructure usage by the different end users / transactions

? Basis for granular costing

Show transactions at their instance level

? Show individual transaction executions

? Important for diagnostics of specific issues

? Reduces the need to reproduce the problems (or more often - wait until it happens repeatedly again) in order to solve it

Discover transaction flow topology for every transaction

? Identify the paths transaction take automatically without requiring pre defined templates, rules or instructions to be set up or maintained.

? Reduce time to problem resolution

? Offer unparallel visibility into the IT elements that carry each and every transaction

? Help in identifying configuration issues

Provide business impact information for every incident

? Provide automated reporting in real time of the impact on users activities of infrastructure incidents

? Real time identification of the exact business impact of performance degradation

? Help prioritize problem resolution efforts based on business impact

Proactively identify and alert to problems before they impact business

? Alerting based on trending of real business transactions performance (across tiers)

? Alerting based on end user experience monitoring

? Reduce the impact of performance problems on business outcome and users

? Receive alerts when business transaction SLAs are breached due to poor performance between the client and the data center

Ability to provide analytics and historical reports

? Turn the data into meaningful information for rapid support of key service management processes

? Reduce the level of expertise required to perform key service management process

? Support executive level decision making, such as for provisioning, service trending, on–boarding of new customers, efficiency and effectiveness analysis of key processes

Support business process views

Visualize and monitor business processes that are a compound of several transactions (e.g. place order, confirm order, cancel order sequence)

? Provides IT with visibility not only of the individual transactions but of business transactions preformed by the end user as well as a whole business process

? Reduce time to problem resolution of business transactions

? Provides IT with the ability to manage performance at the business transaction levels, such as stock trade – Ability to better align IT with customers’ needs

Focus load testing on the most relevant transactions

Use cross- tier transactional based information, collected in production and functional testing, to identify transaction mix for load testing

Focus on the most problematic issues. Focus testing on the most relevant and up-to-date transaction mix. Perform sensitivity testing by adjusting the transaction mix to stress vulnerable tier and to find its tolerance profile

Provide real-time alerts based on business events with complex event processing (CEP)

Correlate disparate event data sources (i.e. from BTM and other third-party data) and then add business rules to define business and IT operation abnormality thresholds and smarter alerts, based on the disparate event sources fed into the CEP engine.

? Increased agility to meet business demands

? Timely alerts on potential problems (e.g. fraudulent transactions and bad end user experience or behavior)

? Notification via mobile phones, emails, dashboards and command centers

? Combined data sources (i.e. BTM and third-party) for enhanced business information for IT and the business

? More effective problem isolation and resolution by understanding criticality of events and prioritization of problems

? Automates manual checking processes

Operational

Overhead

? Production designed solution

? Provide required functionality with minimum agent deployment

? For agent based deployment perform all monitoring at a very low overhead in high load (for production and load test )

? Quick time to value, allows IT to rollout required agents safely and quickly

? Agents are low overhead and failsafe, being unable to impact the application

Ease of use

? Needs to work out of the box with no need for long setup, instrumentation and configuration process and modeling

? Open architecture to support proprietary apps

? Customizable dashboards to provide different views for different users

? Provide relevant and meaningful alerts.

? Works out of the box – very quick time to value

? Using the product is not dependant on application expertise

? Support rapid expansion to many applications

? SDK enables customers to extend the product to monitor new application tiers

? Dashboards can be easily created containing only the relevant information for different types of users.

? Alerts relate to business services. Not fine-grained components.

Broad platform support

Support SOA, middleware, databases, legacy and proprietary technology stacks

In order to get the full picture of the activity in the system, a solution must be able to support the important parts of the environment on which the transactions traverse

Provide view into 3rd-party applications and components

Support for application of unknown design/no access to code

? Provides IT with visibility into 3rd-party applications’ and components’ performance

? Reduce the time to identify performance issues associated with 3rd party applications and components.

? Quickly identify 3rd party related performance issues and communicate it back to the ISV while providing the relevant information to help the ISV resolve those issues

Meet security requirements of sensitive production systems

? Do not allow changing of transaction parameters

? Agent and server communications must be secured

? Audit all configuration updates and changes in a single location

? Include a role based security administration of the product

Meet security compliance requirements and allow the product to run in highly mission critical production applications

Scalability

? Scale to meet peak loads of 70,000 transactions per minute/hour/day

? Allow to maintain the data store for long periods of time

Address many critical applications