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Finding the source
Or, as Correlsense CEO Oren Elias wrote, the business and its customers don't care about proxy servers, LDAP authentication, disk I/O, and memory leaks, it's all about finding the source. He offered this example of six minute hang-ups in trading systems: [The company's] IT experts convened in a war room but were unable to identify the cause of the problem and decided to try a business transaction management solution. They installed agents, and the BTM solution went to work performing a system-wide auto-discovery and aggregating data at the transaction level across all the tiers in the data center.
When the problem showed up again, they were able to see immediately that the bottleneck was in the external database. Zooming into a granular breakdown of the workload for that database, they found a specific SQL statement that was accounting for 90 percent of the transaction workload and was affecting the performance of the entire application.
However, Elias wrote, identifying that SQL statement was not enough to fix the actual problem: The statement could have been sent out as a result of any number user actions, or a defect in the application code could have been causing tens of thousands of statements to be sent out to the database for no real purpose.
Armed with BTM data, the IT pros were able to find out which transactions were sending out these SQL statements and the user who was initiating them. It turned out they had a client who was an independent stock broker. He had two servers and had written his own code to "screen scrape" the bank's application in order to collect market data to improve his trading of stock options. He was doing it in short bursts when there was a good opportunity for him in the market.
Distributed world? New way to see the connections
And for the average employee or manager, the application-on or off-is what counts, affecting as it does such business realities as sales transactions, trading volumes, or customer service responses. Maybe that's a key reason why various articles in the trade press are beginning to sprout up like fresh wheat, all touting the message that BTM is "hot" in 2009.
Common sense dictates that a common terminology around something everyone can relate to (such as application performance) is useful, in the war room or planning IT development at the boardroom table.
Why else is interest in, and activities around, the BTM sector gathering momentum? With all the talk of considering cloud-based computing, BTM is tagging along as it has gained an early rep for being able to handle the complexity such "distribution" brings. Also, notes Dr. Salsburg, in the current economy, with high asset utilization all the rage-and server sprawl to boost application performance not really an option-IT managers will have to work harder to make sure that everything works in an orderly way.
In times when cost-cutting is priority, tools that help establish links from application to various supporting systems can help IT personnel make smarter server consolidation choices ("You don't want to wipe out a claims processing system with a wrong decision," according to Elias.)
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