Wednesday, March 11, 2009

BTM Benefits Both Business and IT

Business Transaction Management is becoming a strategic investment for any enterprise since it sits at heart of IT management.

With a complete BTM solution, every single transaction is captured and traced; from the moment the end user hits a button in any application, be it browser or desktop based, to the last CICS program call in the Mainframe.

Complete BTM solutions do this within a production environment - are always turned on - in order to assure the reliability of complex modern applications.

The Benefits

BTM enables IT to align with business requirements by making sure every business transaction is processed successfully in a timely manner along with putting every IT process within the datacenter in the context of an end user activated transaction.

End-to-end transaction tracing enables full accountability for every transaction processed within the IT topology. Whether it spans through proxys, load balancers, web servers, application servers - based on J2EE/.NET, C/C++ or even proprietary home grown applications (e.g Cobol) - down to message brokers/hubs, databases and legacy systems within the Mainframe.

No tier is ignored, no transaction is lost. Real time alerts are propagated - proactively - from the moment a performance degredation starts to occur. Root-cause-analysis can always be done in a scientific and accurate manner.

By creating a Performance Management Database (PMDB) – IT staff can now speak to each other in a common language. No more talking about packets, HTTP, SQL, or CICS – but a single transaction that encapsulates all relevant information on how it is doing, where, and when.

Automatic topology mapping is a byproduct of any BTM solution. By tracing the transaction along the IT topology, a complete map of IT relations – what logical component is interacting with what – emerges. At a granularity that has never before been available. Every web server instance, every message broker, every database and every external application that is part of a transaction flow will be located in the relevant path within the topology map. Real time measurements allow constant monitoring of latencies between different tiers, and actual transaction volumes.

Proactive management – Proactive resource allocation management per transaction instance, or in other words prioritization of transactions according to business context, or blocking of transactions/transaction segments according to security requirements, are all part of the potential of the BTM solution.