1. Rocky Mountain CMG Spring? ‘09 Forum
Active Context Tracking™ technology enabling business transaction management in a distributed environment
Rocky Mountain CMG Spring? ‘09 Forum

2. Agenda Business context is sorely needed
Introducing business context with ACT
OpTier CoreFirst examples

3. Business context is sorely needed

4. Lack of business context IT symptoms
Problem isolation and resolution is ineffective
Support struggling to recreate problems
Problems “disappear” and “pop-up” without any notice
“All hands” calls and constant firefighting
Outages
In spite of widespread monitoring
Recovery times are difficult to manage with no visibility
Application rollouts effects are hard to predict
Capacity planning
Still don’t directly map business transactions to resources
Can’t predict the impact of specific systems scale issues
Shared service potential is hindered

5. Define a “Business Transaction”…
Business transactions are
All tasks or services that an application provides to users or other applications (e.g., account balance query, stock trade, inventory update, risk compliance report, …)
Business transactions have
A unique business context (Who What When Where)
A unique technical profile composed of
Transaction flow topology across a set of IT components (e.g., Java beans, Web services, SQL queries) that execute on multiple tiers to jointly deliver the service
Performance metrics
Resource metrics
Business transactions are at the heart of the business and so they need to be placed at the heart of the IT management solutions.
Lets define a Business Transaction ….
It has two faces – a business face and a n IT face…. ……
So, transactions are not the components they are made up of (e.g., CICS transactions, EJBs and SQL statements are not transactions, only components of the overall end to end cross tier business transaction.
Transactions can be requested by users (people using online systems) or by other systems (applications).
Transactions can be continuous (or synchronous or single-step) or discontinuous (or asynchronous or multi-step).
In Service Oriented Architectures the business transaction equates to the invocation of a service or business service. Specifically in Web Services transactions are invoked via a standard interface called the web service interface. 5

6. Business Transaction Management
End-user
business
transactions
Increasing, varied demand
Business Transaction Management
Cross-tier
transaction flow
Application Management
SOA/ESB integration
Applications
Systems Management
Consolidation, virtualization
IT Infrastructure 6 6 6 6 6

7. Introducing business context with ACT

8. Active Context Tracking™ Providing business context and visibility by actively gluing business and IT
Transaction
topology map
Management Server
& Web GUI
Transaction profiles collected
Agent
DTE
Agent
DTE
Agent
DTE
Agent
DTE
User request
DB Server
Web Server
App Server
(.Net/J2EE)
MSG Bus
App Server
Observed
Tier
DTE = Dynamic Tier Extension

9. OpTier CoreFirst examples

10. Business transaction mapping
Automatic discovery of business transactions
Key metrics include:
Users, transaction types, transaction rates, performance and resources consumed
Examples here show service visibility with BTM

11. Infrastructure resource mapping
Automatic discovery of the service topology for transactions
Monitor resources consumed by each transaction at each tier
Report IT metrics with real business context
Example shows automatic topology capture and resource consumption graph for business transactions

12. Dynamic linking and E2E management
Each transaction is dynamically linked and monitored in real time
End to end flow and metrics are visible down to the single transaction instance
Examples here show transaction visibility on the type and instance levels

13. OpTier homepage: http://www.optier.com
Thank you
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