BTM in the Enterprise
By examining the flow of a business transaction step-by-step, we can understand the role of specialized monitoring technologies as well as the unique ability of BTM to provide visibility and insight across infrastructure silos.
Network and Enterprise System Monitors
Network monitors measure packet loss and bandwidth utilization to ensure that packets make it from point A to point B in adequate time and with low error rates.
Enterprise system monitors show the average resource consumption for different components, but do not indicate the response times that those components are providing to end users.
APM and Database Tools
J2EE/.NET profilers, also known as deep dive Application Performance Management tools, show deep J2EE metrics that are valuable to the development and application support team, but rarely provide much value in the production environment. This is because the method by which they collect their data (byte code instrumentation) creates substantial overhead in production, and the metrics provided are typically only meaningful to J2EE/.NET experts.
Database tools can provide query response times, but lack the business and user context of each database query - i.e. the user and business transaction that initiated the query to the database.
Stand-Alone User Experience Monitors
Real user monitoring tools show end-to-end response times for user interactions, but are unable to break down those response times into the time spent at the various IT infrastructure components that were involved. They do not provide the information required to rapidly identify and resolve issues, or to identify issues before users are affected.
Business Transaction Management
Conventional monitoring tools can provide important diagnostic information for individual infrastructure components. But they do not put technical issues into the context of the affected business transactions. On their own, they do not enable IT to identify, diagnose, prioritize and resolve issues according to their business impact.
In contrast, Business Transaction Management delivers end-to-end visibility of all business transactions, across all tiers, all the time. It indicates transaction performance and behavior from the end-user perspective, and at the same time, monitors each individual infrastructure tier. Business Transaction Management enables IT to identify and resolve issues before users are affected - or in accordance with SLAs determined by the business. BTM creates a bridge between users, IT and the business that improves everything from communications to change management, capacity planning and application support.
