Using Business Transaction Monitoring For Application Performance

By Author: Joseph Mathew
Total Articles: 11
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For many companies, the application is the business. That means that uptime and availability are not just “nice to haves”; they’re key to business survival.

What’s necessary is for app owners to confront and master the rate of change in their environments, ensuring that they can keep up with the needs of the business. They need to see and understand their entire application environment and resolve problems quickly when they occur – and do all of this without fear of what the next code drop may bring.

How can this be done? By not simply relying on server monitoring software but by embracing business transactions.

How Business Transactions Support Application Management

Business Transaction Monitoring equips application owners with three important advantages.

1. Knowledge of User Experience

If a business transaction is a “user-generated action,” then it’s pretty clear how monitoring business transactions can have a tremendous effect on your ability to understand the experience of ...
... your end user.

If your end user adds a book to a shopping cart, is the transaction performing as expected or is it taking 3 seconds longer? Monitoring business transactions gives you a powerful insight into the experience of your end user.

2. Service Assurance – the ability to track baseline performance metrics

It’s difficult to know what “normal” actually is. This is particularly true in an ever-changing application environment. If you try to determine normal performance by doing manual application performance tuning the old-fashioned way and looking through log files, you will never get there.

Business transactions offer a Service Assurance constant that you can use for ongoing monitoring. The size of your environment may change and the number of nodes may come and go, but by focusing on business transactions as your ongoing metric, you can begin to create baseline performance for your application. Understanding this baseline performance is exactly what you need in order to understand whether your application is running as expected and desired, or whether it’s completely gone off the rails.

3. Triage & Diagnosis - always knowing where to look to solve problems

Finally, when problems occur, business transactions prevent you from hunting through logs and swimming through lines of code. The transaction’s poor performance immediately shines a spotlight on the problem – and your ability to get to root cause quickly is dramatically improved.

If you’re tracking code-level metrics in a large environment instead of monitoring business transactions, the chances are that the fire you’re troubleshooting is going to roar out of hand before you’re able to douse it.

Dramatically reducing Mean-Time-to-Resolution cycles is how business transactions support application owners. Multiple code drops are nothing to fear if resolving performance problems ends up being a matter of minutes, rather than torturous hours of late-night firefighting.