BTM vs. Traditional Monitoring

Business Transaction Management (BTM) is an IT systems management paradigm that seeks to manage IT from the business perspective. The transactions that Customers and Employees execute represent the Business. The IT department's number one goal is to ensure that those transactions are being executed in a timely and reliable manner. BTM solutions are able to trace the path of these business transactions throughout the Data Center, across all of the tiers, so that if something goes wrong the exact problematic location is identified instantly.

While traditional monitoring tools seek to monitor the health of individual components, BTM solutions monitor the organization's bottom line – the transaction. The measurement granularity of traditional tools is limited, the can only measure total resource consumption for a specific server, BTM's measurement granularity is a single event which could be a web service call, SQL statement or HTTP request.

Traditional tools monitor performance as server up time, the problem with this is that while "all lights are green" for a specific server, the transactions that are flowing through that server are not necessarily doing so in a timely manner. BTM tools monitor the performance of what really counts – the user's quality of experience.