[Hawkular-dev] What is Business Transaction Management (prep for F2F)

[Gary Brown]

Hi all

As suggested recently by others, we want to focus the F2F sessions on discussions rather than presentations. So in that spirit, I thought it would be good to get the "What is Business Transaction Management" discussion out of the way as a ML thread, so that the F2F session can discuss what and how to build BTM in a Hawkular context.

Taking some excerpts from Wikipedia:

"Business transaction management (BTM), 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."

Some of the applications of BTM listed are:

"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-premises, off-premises) infrastructure."

Obviously we need to focus our efforts on the monitoring/alerting aspects initially, and this is what I am expecting the F2F discussion will be focused on, but a couple of these areas may be of interest in the future.

Any views on the above appreciated.

Regards
Gary