Transaction Monitoring Software's Jargon Proliferation

There is more than one way to skin a Cat they say. This famous idiom seems to translate even to monitoring transactions. In the Transaction Monitoring Software world we would say; there is more than one way to trace a transaction. Although the truth is that the different approaches to transaction tracing do not yield the same outcome, no matter how you skin a Cat, you will end up with a skinned Cat.
 
When it comes to monitoring transactions many outcomes are possible, a transaction monitor is like an injective function. This makes things confusing, why should performing a transaction trace and monitoring for transaction performance mean something different with every approach? It’s because this whole new Transaction Monitoring Software discipline is still in that “early adopter” phase and standards have yet to be set, not unlike “VHS vs. Betamax” or “Blu ray vs. HD DVD”.
 
Monitoring for transaction performance is a clear next step for many enterprises, but when it actually comes to putting a transaction monitoring system in place, it is very hard for many IT professionals to understand the value proposition.

Transaction Monitor? Transaction Trace?

With so many buzz words used to describe Transaction Monitoring Software solutions these days it interesting to see how there is no link whatsoever between the words used and what the technology actually does, vendors that use the same exact words to describe their products may have completely different offerings at the end of the day; as seen in “Transaction Monitoring – the Four Approaches”.
 
It is also interesting to see that the words “monitor” and “trace” are synonyms in English, and in fact, it seems as though “transaction monitor” and “transaction trace” are used pretty much interchangeably in the industry, but when you really think about it they can mean different things. The only place where it seems that Transaction Tracing and Transaction Monitoring have been defined side by side is at Doug Mcclure’s blog. Intuitively you could say that a Transaction Trace is the topology of the transaction (over the different tiers of the infrastructure) and that a transaction monitor includes all of the metrics of that transaction (i.e. events summoned and resource consumption)

Why Monitor Transactions?

Monitoring and tracing transactions is the way to link between Business and IT in today’s applications.

The "Business” being the user initiating transaction activations; clicking on the “add to shopping cart” button, performing a stock trade, requesting to view an MRI and so on. The majority of interactions between the User and the UI (be it a web page or desktop application) create transactions. The business depends on these transactions, and since the business has spent, in most cases, millions of dollars to allow users to perform these transactions, they better work! And in a time that the user is willing to put up with, time is money after all.
 
The "IT” is everything that goes on in the infrastructure to allow that transaction to fully execute. A good example is that annoying SQL statement that has just caused the application to hang because it was activated 100,000 times. Without the link, the Database Administrator is going to have a tough time figuring out how to keep the problem from occurring again. With the link, that single statement is now tied to a specific transaction and user. All the way from the back end the DBA can understand the business impact of the statements, because she knows exactly what the intent of the user was, and how long it took for that user to complete the transaction from end to end.

Transaction Monitoring with SharePath

SharePath will link every single transaction to all of the events that the transaction invoked within the infrastructure, giving you the power to link Your Business with Your IT, enabling root cause analysis and proactively ensuring that every single one of your customers are satisfied.