OpTier™ provides software solutions that dynamically link business services to underlying IT infrastructure, assuring service delivery and optimizing IT resources. Its unique Business Transaction Management™ technology – which delivers end-to-end visibility and control of all business transactions – makes effective Business Service Management a reality.

The dependence of Business on IT manifests itself most clearly in the multitude of interactions between customers, employees and partners that occur at any given moment within a company’s IT system. Each interaction represents a single IT-provided function (e.g. printing a report, placing an order, sending a query, etc.) and is referred to as a business transaction. For an enterprise to succeed, it needs to be able to view, and then manage, all such business transactions from both the Business and IT perspectives. While both Business and IT would like to know which services were consumed by whom and how quickly they were delivered, IT is further interested in which components participated in the service delivery and what was the effect on the overall infrastructure.

OpTier solutions address these challenges in production by automatically mapping business services to IT infrastructure. They track and monitor all business transactions – across all tiers, all the time – in order to create and maintain a complete profile of transaction activity in terms of time and resources. OpTier solutions actively identify and isolate performance problems as they develop, and before users can be affected, thus minimizing the cost and time to resolve them. OpTier solutions generate business service intelligence, for more effective testing, capacity planning, provisioning and decision-making. They can further prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs, especially under peak loads.

OpTier helps IT assess and improve its business effectiveness as well as optimize its investment in infrastructure and resources. And this is all done on an ongoing basis, without having to correlate events, change application code or use any additional instrumentation. Headquartered in New York, OpTier serves enterprises throughout the US and in Europe. For further information, visit www.optier.com.

An automated source for reliable topology data of business transactions for determining the impact of services outages and changes is a vital part for any BSM initiative that seeks to link IT infrastructure performance to business service levels.

OpTier's CoreFirst™ provides an innovative approach to assuring application performance and availability at the transaction level. CoreFirst automatically tags each business transaction and monitors its progress across the stack. This capability enables a real-time view into business transaction performance, helping to track service delivery all the time. CoreFirst also helps IT get a clear view into how business transactions operate in multi-tier applications across the stack, allowing them to instantly understand the real business impact of every infrastructure event or failure.

All of this is done dynamically and in real time to truly deliver "end-to-end" visibility. CoreFirst can further prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs. This function can help overcome business service disruptions according to policy or ad-hoc in real time.

Throwing hardware at performance problems, however tempting, is an expensive yet ineffective exercise. Businesses today strive for operational effectiveness by driving costs down and increasing productivity. Therefore, over-provisioning as a solution to application performance problems is no longer viable. Moreover application performance problems caused by user behavior, server mis-configuration, data volume changes and a host of other reasons, will not be improved by over-provisioning.

For example, a coding error that causes each login request to make excessive round-trips to the database will not be alleviated one bit by a stronger server. The server is not the bottleneck in this case.

Another example is a mis-configured connection pool parameter for an application server, which can cause transactions to wait for the next available database connection. This case will also not be solved by a stronger server. And there are many other similar examples.

To summarize, insufficient hardware is rarely the cause for performance problems. The actual cause is generally related to the transactional behavior of the application in production, its production configurations and its data volumes. Throwing hardware at these problems will usually be a waste of money (only serving to increase complexity) and does not solve the problem.

When a new transaction is developed, it typically undergoes a process of acceptance testing in a controlled environment. In addition to functional testing, load testing is performed for the new transaction and its response times are recorded. In an isolated testing environment, response times for the transaction would typically be consistent. These response times, assuming they are generally acceptable, serve as the baseline for the transaction’s service delivery requirements.

When testing is completed, the new transaction is deployed in the production environment. Unlike the consistent response times found in the test environment, the transaction’s response times are now fluctuating due to resource contention with other transactions within the same environment. This resource contention could cause the transaction to sometimes work slower than its defined requirement. Over time, the response-time graph will show peaks and valleys rather than a straight, consistent line. Each peak indicates potential end-user delays that could lead to customer dissatisfaction and ultimately loss of revenue.

Load testing of applications can simulate production contention characteristics and is therefore a highly recommended technique for identifying such issues earlier on in the process. CoreFirst offers a complementary solution for integration load testing to help identify – and mitigate – such issues in real time.

OpTier’s CoreFirst solution defines a new category of product – Business Transaction Management. It is unlike any other product on the market because it automatically maps business services to IT infrastructure in production and test environments. CoreFirst has the unique ability to:

Track and monitor all business transactions – across all tiers, all the time – in order to create and maintain a complete profile of transaction activity in terms of time and resources

Identify and isolate performance problems as they develop, and before users can be affected, thus minimizing the cost and time to resolve them

Generate business service intelligence, for more effective testing, capacity planning, provisioning and decision-making

Prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs, especially under peak loads

No other vendor of production-grade solutions can make these claims.

Unlike traditional APM and SLM solutions, CoreFirst starts at the transaction level. APM and SLM solutions monitor all infrastructure layers (web servers, app servers, DBs, etc.) and then correlate activities to attempt to statistically deduce transactional behavior. CoreFirst automatically “barcodes” each transaction entering the system and then tracks it across all tiers in real time. Thus, the business context of the transaction is introduced to all the underlying IT infrastructure layers and organizational silos.

The result is end-to-end visibility of all business transactions with the ability to drill down to their performance characteristics. The progress of a business transaction is tracked across all tiers (such as a DB or app server) in order to ascertain its impact on server performance and resource allocation. CoreFirst is also the only solution that can prioritize transaction resource allocation (by policy or ad-hoc). In summary, CoreFirst monitors business transactions from the ground, up while other solutions attempt to monitor application infrastructure using patched transaction heuristics capabilities.

CoreFirst automatically tracks and monitors business transactions and can prioritize their resource allocation. Unlike job schedulers that focus on jobs at the system layer, CoreFirst centers on real end-user transactions. It adds a business transaction context to virtualized and grid computing environments, providing IT staff with a much better understanding of transaction execution paths and performance characteristics within the virtualized environment.

A lightweight CoreFirst agent is deployed to each server participating in the application infrastructure.

CoreFirst delivers real-time and historical production data to improve new application/new release planning and reduce reliance on over-provisioning. Not only can architects and capacity planners perform trend analysis, CoreFirst provides end-to-end visibility into each transaction ­– illuminating exactly where it goes and what resources it consumes at each tier along the way.

With CoreFirst, applications teams dramatically decrease the risk of failure and user-rejection associated with rollouts of key applications and new technology implementations, including SOA and shared services programs. CoreFirst diminishes this risk by automatically tracking and monitoring all transactions, across all tiers, all the time. It identifies and isolates any performance problems that may arise during load and acceptance testing. And during application rollout – an inherently unstable time – CoreFirst ensures that service delivery requirements are met through prioritization of transaction resource allocation.

Typically not more then 5% overhead (in fact many times this is more a 1%-3% range)

The first step starts with profiling and monitoring. Using CoreFirst to provide end-to-end visibility into the actual service delivery requirements provided by your systems and applications, at the end-user transaction level, and across tiers can be a great foundation for such policy making. Although every transaction may be important, there can still be “levels of importance and latency sensitivity”. Levels of importance can be determined by asking: What is the impact to the business if specific transactions do not execute on a timely basis? How is this relative to other transactions?

Ad hoc priority setting is also a very common scenario where runaway or resource-hog situations occur and need to be remedied without killing or restarting systems.

OpTier™ dynamically links business services to underlying IT infrastructure, assuring service delivery and optimizing IT resources:

Map business services to IT infrastructure in production environments

Track and monitor all business transactions – across all tiers, all the time

Create and maintain a complete profile of transaction activity in terms of time and resources

Identify and isolate performance problems as they develop, and before users are affected

Prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs, especially under peak loads

in order to

Deliver end-to-end visibility and control of all business transactions

Minimize the cost and time to resolve performance problems

Generate business service intelligence, for more effective testing and capacity planning

Assess and improve the business effectiveness of IT

Optimize investments in IT infrastructure and resources

CoreFirst automatically maps business services to IT infrastructure. It tracks and monitors all business transactions – across all tiers, all the time – in order to create and maintain a complete profile of transaction activity in terms of time and resources. CoreFirst actively identifies and isolates performance problems as they develop, and before users can be affected, thus minimizing the cost and time to resolve them. It generates business service intelligence, for more effective testing, capacity planning, provisioning and decision-making. It can further prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs, especially under peak loads.

CoreFirst helps IT assess and improve its business effectiveness as well as optimize its investment in infrastructure and resources. And this is all done on an ongoing basis, without having to correlate events, change application code or use any additional instrumentation.

Transaction Profiler

Collects and analyzes ongoing transaction activity enabling cross-tier understanding of transactions, applications, users, tiers, etc.

Performance Policy Manager

Defines transaction / user performance policies

Transaction Workload Manager

Manages transaction workloads across server tiers, with granular availability and performance monitoring

Web servers, e.g. Apache, IBM HTTP Server, Sun Web Server (iPlanet) and more

Application servers, e.g. .NET servers, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, SAP NetWeaver and more

Databases, e.g. Oracle, Sybase, DB2/UDB 8 and more

Protocol support for observed tiers, e.g. HTTP, HTTPS, IIOP/RMI and more

Operating systems, e.g. Microsoft Windows 2000/XP, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and more

Grid environments, e.g. DataSynapse GridServer

Legacy and proprietary servers and protocols – supported via open API, SDK and external instrumentation

*The above represents a partial list. We are constantly adding more platforms!
Please contact an OpTier representative for the full updated listing.