| Why a new generation? What's wrong with the old | | | | Websphere application server on a windows machine, |
| one? | | | | flowing through an MQSeries queue, eventually |
| Traditional systems management tools focused on | | | | querying an Oracle database. Members of the "war |
| monitoring the health of individual components. Tools | | | | room" typically include Java and J2EE performance |
| like IBM Tivoli, BMC patrol, CA Unicenter, and HP | | | | experts, Microsoft windows system managers, Unix |
| Openview, initially focused on management of servers, | | | | (Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.) system managers, |
| services, and resources. In those days, the equation | | | | database administrators (DBAs), Network sysadmins, |
| was relatively simple - 100% cpu utilization = bad, 10% | | | | and proxy specialists, just to name a few. This is a |
| cpu utilization = good. However, the increasing | | | | lengthy process that can take thousands of man hours |
| complexity of applications introduced numerous new | | | | to complete. |
| enterprise application components including databases, | | | | The new paradigm - Business Transaction Monitoring |
| connection pools, webservers, application servers, load | | | | The "new generation" of systems monitoring and |
| balancing routers, and middleware. The business | | | | management tools, widely referred to as Business |
| service management industry followed shortly after, | | | | Transaction Management (or BTM), offer a new |
| and began offering tools for database management , | | | | approach. Instead of monitoring SQL statements, tcp/ip |
| monitoring of network traffic, mining application metrics, | | | | packets, and CPU utilization, Transaction Management |
| and analyzing webserver access logs. Each of these | | | | tools view everything from an application perspective. |
| business service management tools "speaks" a | | | | In the world of transaction management , an application |
| different language - database management tools | | | | is considered as a collection of transactions and |
| speak in "SQL statements", network traffic tools use | | | | events, each triggering actions on the infrastructure. |
| "packets", while systems monitoring report in "CPU and | | | | The goal is to track every transaction end to end and |
| disk usage". | | | | correlate to the information collected from the |
| So what happens when the application crashes or | | | | infrastructure. Such an end-to-end view enables to |
| hangs? | | | | quickly isolate and troubleshoot the root cause of |
| What do you do if a single transaction suffers slow | | | | performance problems and start tuning proactively. |
| response times? | | | | This application-centric information base enables a |
| In comes the "war room" | | | | group of professionals working together to "speak" the |
| To cope with the proliferation of information sources, | | | | same language and focus on facts, rather than |
| enterprises came up with the notion of the "war room". | | | | guesswork. |
| Whenever slow response times or poor performance | | | | According to IDC (Business Transaction Management |
| of critical applications is detected, relevant personnel | | | | - Another Step in the Evolution of IT Management ), |
| are grouped together into a room for brainstorming | | | | BTM (Business Transaction Management ) will likely |
| and joint monitoring. This involves a large amount of | | | | become a core offering of established IT system |
| professionals, since a single transaction may flow | | | | management vendors, since it can contribute to almost |
| through several infrastructure components. For | | | | every aspect of IT management - ranging from |
| example, a financial transaction will trigger an HTTP | | | | performance management , SLA (Service Level |
| request to an apache webserver installed on top of | | | | Agreement) management , capacity planning, to |
| Redhat Enterprise linux, which in turns calls a | | | | change and configuration management (CMDB). |