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By Lauren Bielski
Applications so consequential that they "can never be down" would benefit from being monitored with business transaction management, which describes connections between infrastructure and apps and all the events that compose each transaction and can simplify their management.
Or so proponents say, many of whom are declaring BTM an emerging area to watch this year. (Gartner has also referred to this area as Application Performance Monitoring in a report published in 2007.)
Why do IT pros need details delivered in the way of a blow by blow? As Wikipedia puts it, BTM is helpful at at a time when: "Modern Applications have become more complex, modular, distributed, interdependent and sensitive to environmental conditions," and "IT infrastructure has become more complex and multi-tier." If there are performance issues, these tools can help to paint a picture of connectivity beyond the standard component-derived stats that supports a more rapid diagnosis.
Even under ordinary operating conditions, BTM's ability to support transaction discovery and inventory can help IT staff prioritize maintenance work or upgrades, notes Dr. Michael Salsburg, a distinguished engineer for Unisys Corp. and member of the Computer Measure Group, Turnersville, N.J.
Still in early adoption, BTM is made possible by the increasingly standardized deployment of applications, according to Dr. Salsburg. "The confluence of widely used standard architectures and the gradual introduction over the last decade of a variety of auto discovery tools have led to the development of solutions that look 'higher up the stack,' beyond CPU utilization and other standardized performance statistics," he says.
The Unisys engineer and Computer Measure Group member sees any emerging interest in BTM as part of a broader governance movement based on mapping the environment as well as relying on statistics (such as incorporated by Netuitive) do gauge service levels. These tools will increase in importance in step with increased adoption of virtualization and services, in order to determine which [business] services get increased infrastructure-based "firepower" in given timeframe to run efficiently and not break the operation.
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