Business transaction management (BTM), also known as business transaction monitoring, application transaction profiling or user defined transaction profiling, is the practice of managing information technology (IT) from a business transaction perspective. It provides a tool for tracking the flow of transactions across IT infrastructure, in addition to detection, alerting, and correction of unexpected changes in business or technical conditions. BTM provides visibility into the flow of transactions across infrastructure tiers, including a dynamic mapping of the application topology.

Using BTM, application support teams are able to search for transactions based on message context and content – for instance, time of arrival or message type – providing a way to isolate causes for common issues such as application exceptions, stalled transactions, and lower-level issues such as incorrect data values.

The ultimate goal of BTM is to improve service quality for users conducting business transactions while improving the effectiveness of the IT applications and infrastructure across which those transactions execute. The main benefit of BTM is its capacity to identify precisely where transactions are delayed within the IT infrastructure. BTM also aims to provide proactive problem prevention and the generation of business service intelligence for optimization of resource provisioning and virtualization.

A number of factors have led to the demand for the development of BTM software:

• Modern applications have become more complex, modular, distributed, interdependent and sensitive to environmental conditions.
• IT infrastructure has become a complex multi-tier (see multitier architecture
  Multitier architecture
  In software engineering, multi-tier architecture is a client–server architecture in which the presentation, the application processing, and the data management are logically separate processes. For example, an application that uses middleware to service data requests between a user and a database...
  
  ) environment.
• The rise of service-oriented architecture
  Service-oriented architecture
  In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
  
   in systems development .
• The proliferation of service level agreement
  Service Level Agreement
  A service-level agreement is a part of a service contract where the level of service is formally defined. In practice, the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time or performance...
  
  s.

Applications

BTM solutions capture all of the transaction instances in the production environment and as such can be used for monitoring as well as for analysis and planning. Some applications include:

• Outage avoidance and problem isolation: Identification and isolation of tier-specific performance and availability issues.
• Service level management: Monitoring of SLAs and alerting of threshold breaches both at the end-user and infrastructure tier level.
• Infrastructure optimization: Modification of the configuration of data center infrastructure to maximize utilization and improve performance.
• Capacity planning: Analysis of usage and performance trends in order to estimate future capacity requirements.
• Change management: Analysis of the impact of change on transaction execution.
• Cloud management: Track the end-to-end transaction flow across both cloud (private, hybrid, public) and dedicated (on-premise, off-premise) infrastructure.

Transaction discovery methods

BTM systems track each of the hops in the transaction path using a variety of data collection methods including OS-level sockets, network packet sniffing, log parsing, agent-based middleware protocol sniffing, and others.

Relationship to application performance management

BTM is sometimes categorized as a form of application performance monitoring or management. It works alongside other IT monitoring systems including End-User Experience Monitoring, Synthetic Transaction Monitoring, Deep-Dive Monitoring and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solutions. According to Gartner, BTM and deep dive monitoring are “fundamentally distinct and their associated processes are typically carried out by different communities with different skill sets… The buyer should still implement multiple products, even if it means greater architectural complexity and apparent functional overlap.”

Relationship to virtualization and cloud computing

BTM dynamically maps the execution of a user transaction as it traverses the data center. In both virtualized and cloud environments, the relationship between the application and infrastructure is to some degree dynamically allocated or defined. BTM discovers the infrastructure currently executing each transaction instance for purposes of problem identification, resolution, and infrastructure tuning. In public and hybrid cloud architectures, BTM has the ability to profile transactions from the datacenter, to the cloud provider, and back.

See also

• Application lifecycle management
  Application lifecycle management
  Application Lifecycle Management is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance...
  
  
• Application performance management
  Application Performance Management
  Application performance management, or APM, refers to the discipline within systems management that focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications....
  
  
• Application Response Measurement
  Application Response Measurement
  Application Response Measurement is an open standard published by the Open Group for monitoring and diagnosing performance bottlenecks within complex enterprise applications that use loosely-coupled designs or service-oriented architectures....
  
  
• Application service management
  Application Service Management
  Application service management is an emerging discipline within systems management that focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and quality of service of business transactions....
  
  
• Information technology
  Information technology
  Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
  
  
• Systems management
  Systems management
  Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications....
  
  
• Business service management
  Business Service Management
  Business service management is an approach used to manage business-aligned IT services. A BSM philosophy promotes a customer-centric and business-focused approach to Service Management, aligning business objectives and priorities with IT or ICT from strategy through to operations and continual...
  
  
• Business performance management
  Business performance management
  Business performance management is a set of management and analytic processes that enable the management of an organization's performance to achieve one or more pre-selected goals...
  
  
• Runtime intelligence
  Runtime intelligence
  -Introduction:The term runtime intelligence refers to technologies, managed services and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of application usage levels, patterns and practices...
  
  
• Application service architecture
  Application service architecture
  Application service architecture is an emerging discipline within IT that involves a top down approach to monitoring, controlling, securing, and optimizing applications in transit...