The Importance of a Business Transaction Monitoring Solution in IT Management

The ability to improve business transaction performance
  is something that is not often designed into the tools offered by large system management vendors. As such, they often monitor resources such as: the network, servers, storage or virtualization, which are important things, but they leave out one of the key factors—how to measure the performance of the business transactions that use these resources. This key factor is the most critical element for a business, if it is to survive, grow and ultimately prosper. The larger the business, the more critical this element becomes.



Another very important capability to provide is to measure the availability and performance of each component in a multi-tier composite application as compared to a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Most of the large system management vendors will tell if you the application is up or down, but do not provide the detailed visibility that an IT person needs in order to remediate the situation. Or they provide the information as collections of unrelated metrics out of context with the services the applications provide and the impact their availability has on the business. They don't have an end-to-end view, showing users what is occurring during the processes, what already occurred and the exact state of each application





and transaction from initiation to completion.



Transactions (in this sense) are really concepts. They are units of work and can be implemented in different ways, by different programming standards and methods. The challenge is being able to discover the application (as transactions comprise an application), and then observing them without changing or affecting them. As such, being able to track them as they move through various aspects of the infrastructure is a challenge that many firms have trouble with.



The key is being able to show what a transaction
   (.NET, Java, WMQ or CICS) did. This is accomplished by building a map of transaction topology. This is what businesses want to see, as it shows them what really happened inside their organization.



However monitoring transactions is not enough. This is a high level view which misses what goes on in the middleware layer. If this is missed then you don't have the visibility needed to detect, find and solve the issues. It is important to go into middleware introspection to discover what's occurring in the message packages and then compare that with the transaction layer. This is what provides the needed visibility.



This can be done by searching for patterns in order to spot signs of early warnings. With an early warning system in place, you can find the symptoms that show the regular business functions are veering off course. This is the best way to avoid any major issues or failures before it's too late.



As you can see from this article, the importance of putting a business transaction monitoring solution in place is fundamental in order to detect and fix abnormal activity in an enterprise. The abnormal activity has the potential to cause cascading high-impact failures within the IT system which would lead to lost revenue, fewer customers and a reduced market share. The implications are very stark to a business, which is why Nastel Technologies created AutoPilot.



AutoPilot is a business transaction management solution that ensures the availability and performance of the most critical business applications. This is accomplished via auto discovery, business transaction profiling, real-time monitoring, dynamic dashboards, complex event processing, application performance analysis, root cause analysis, proactive alerting and automated problem resolution.



The ultimate business benefits are guaranteed when a business maintains high application performance, compliance to SLAs and government regulations and reduces user impacting downtime. Fewer incidents mean lower costs and greater productivity. That translates into a more successful business





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