Dedicated to providing comprehensive and up-to-date coverage on Business Transaction Management and its growing place in the IT management industry

BTM Overview

This page answers some of the fundamental questions about Business Transaction Management in order to provide an overview of the monitoring technology and its role in business and IT operations.

What is a business transaction?

A business transaction is an end-to-end transfer of information from an application to an end-user or another application. Business Transactions transverse the various components in the IT infrastructure, to deliver critical information and data when requested by users or applications.

Common examples of business transactions include logging into a bank account to check the account balance, scanning a barcode, completing an online purchase, making travel reservations, printing a report, executing a stock trade, etc.

Why are business transactions important?

Business transactions provide the key to understanding IT from a business perspective – and vice versa. They reveal exactly how business transactions are dependent on IT components, and conversely, precisely how specific components affect the business.

What is Business Transaction Management (BTM)?

In today’s complex IT environment, it is difficult to pinpoint and quickly address problems in transaction flow using traditional monitoring technology. When a business transaction runs slowly or fails altogether, the cost can be high in terms of lost revenues, customer attrition, reduced productivity, support calls and problem resolution.  

BTM technology is designed to track the flow of business transactions across IT infrastructure. It enables rapid detection and correction of unexpected changes or problems in both business and technical conditions. Using business transaction management, application support teams can easily search for transactions based on their context and content, providing a straightforward way to isolate causes of common IT issues including application exceptions, stalled transactions, and even lower-level issues such as incorrect data value entries. BTM solves the limitations of conventional, siloed monitoring solutions by providing end-to-end visibility into every step of a business transaction.

What is the value of BTM?

Business Transaction Management…

  • Delivers end-to-end visibility of all business transactions, across all tiers, all the time
  • Provides detailed information including business context, performance, availability, SLA compliance, flow topology, resource consumption and other IT metrics
  • Assures that business transactions flow smoothly within IT applications and infrastructure by identifying and helping to remove bottlenecks and avoid outages
  • Reveals how changes in IT impact the business and how changes in business practice impact the ability of IT to assure service quality
  • Prioritizes IT management processes based on business needs
  • Optimizes IT to reduce costs while meeting service level objectives