OpTier is the leading provider of Business Transaction Management (BTM). OpTier’s BTM solution (“OpTier BTM”) enables application owners to take control over service performance and availability. Unlike other types of IT management solutions, OpTier BTM monitors all business transactions in the production environment, all of the time, to assure acceptable service levels.

By tracking every single transaction, OpTier BTM can be used not only to prevent outages and shorten problem resolution time, but also to:

• Optimize capacity levels, manage shared service and cloud environments
• Obtain a complete real-time service dependency map
• Manage changes without impacting users
• Provide business impact data to your CMDB/CMS

OpTier BTM monitors all business transactions as they execute in the production environment. With an end-to-end topology view that starts with the user and covers all front-end and back-end tiers, OpTier BTM tracks service levels, performance and transaction behavior to identify issues immediately. Since BTM tracks the end-to-end transaction path, it can identify a problem on a specific tier before it affects service delivery. At the same time, it immediately puts that problem in the relevant business context of the transactions affected.

A business transaction is a discrete, meaningful activity for the end-user and for the business; for example, checking a bank balance, updating an address or making a payment. While a transaction is one activity from the business perspective, from the IT perspective, it is actually a complex entity that executes over a number of pieces of infrastructure. OpTier BTM continuously monitors and displays the full business transaction path, along with all relevant metrics, so that you always have a coherent view of how your infrastructure is behaving in the context of the transactions that it affects.

OpTier’s Transaction Flow Detection™ technology automatically detects each individual transaction in the system as it passes through the different application tiers. There is no need to define or model transaction flows manually. Transaction Flow Detection is powered by Active Context Tracking™ (ACT), a lightweight, non-intrusive technology that automatically tracks every transaction as it crosses multiple tiers. ACT constructs business transactions out of smaller work units on each tier (such as data access at the database level and EJBs on application servers). Typically work units lack any business transaction context. In real-time, ACT associates work units with the logical business transaction instances to which they belong, in order to construct each transaction end-to-end.

Yes, you can create groups of business transactions in order to monitor both the overall user experience and performance metrics in the context of business services. OpTier BTM enables you to define important business processes as a function of multiple transactions, enabling full integration from the business process level to transaction monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping. You can always drill down to obtain precise information about a specific transaction or tier. The OpTier BTM user interface is designed so that more information is never more than two clicks away.

BTM offers a business-centric approach to managing application performance that focuses on the end-to-end transaction, or service, as it flows across the infrastructure. BTM runs continuously in the production environment and provides a topological view of every single transaction instance as it traverses from the client through the datacenter and/or cloud. When a problem occurs that affects the user experience or any part of transaction execution, BTM identifies the problematic tier.

In contrast, traditional APM tools were designed to monitor silos in the production environment and provide detailed information about a component when an alarm is triggered. Because of the volume of data, they typically do not run continuously in full collection mode and are most useful once the problematic tier has been isolated.

In the Gartner report "Keep the Five Keep the Five Functional Dimensions of APM Distinct", Gartner recommends using both BTM and a deep dive APM solution; the functional domains of the two are fundamentally distinct and their associated processes are typically carried out by different communities with different skill sets.

The benefits of BTM extend beyond performance monitoring. Organizations use BTM to optimize capacity levels, obtain a complete real-time service dependency map, manage changes without impacting users, and provide business impact data to a CMDB/CMS. Learn more about the differences between BTM and APM.

BPM enables the execution of a modeled business process flow to be monitored. Most business processes contain some paths that are executed by means of on-line business transactions, and a BPM platform can hand off the monitoring of those transactions to a BTM system. OpTier BTM can relate business transactions within a user session to provide visibility into business processes. Organizations can see which transactions have been run by a user within the business process grouping, and also the user “think time” between transactions. OpTier BTM collects information about the transaction from protocol headers and sometimes from the payload, to determine the full business context (e.g. type of business activity, application, user ID, monetary transaction cost, location, users affected). This information is the most business-centric information that can be automatically generated from the application, and provides the informational link between IT and business teams. Other APM and BTM vendors lack the business context in their transaction traces, and therefore are less able, if at all, to provide visibility into business processes.

It is critical to understand the resource utilization characteristics of applications and transactions in order to ensure that there is enough capacity to meet current and future transaction thresholds. OpTier BTM provides valuable information for capacity planning such as CPU trending by transaction, server and application. It identifies the top consumers of CPU (users, transactions, applications) to ensure optimal use of existing resources. In cloud and shared-service environments, capacity planning becomes an even greater challenge - how do you do plan capacity if you lack visibility into which resources a given transaction is using?

OpTier BTM provides the visibility from the transaction perspective that is a necessary ingredient for accurate capacity planning in cloud and shared environments.It enables you to plan future capacity requirements and prioritize infrastructure investments clearly in terms of their impact on business transactions.

Functional testing and load testing are performed in a controlled testing environment where transaction response times are consistent. These response times typically serve as the baseline for service delivery requirements.

Unfortunately, in the production environment, conditions are far less stable. Transaction response times fluctuate for reasons such as infrastructure configuration, resource contention, and unpredictable user behavior. These variations cause unpredictable performance, SLA breaches and even outages.

OpTier BTM complements load testing initiatives by providing real-time application performance metrics and insight into the actual execution profile (flow, performance breakdown and resource consumption). BTM is a valuable asset before production roll-outs that can substantially reduce the service interruptions associated with new releases.

Yes. APM suites include deep-dive component monitors that can be useful for understanding and resolving problems. OpTier BTM runs continuously in the production environment to track service levels of business transactions as well as the performance of component tiers. When OpTier BTM identifies a problem on a particular tier, it can hand off to the appropriate deep-dive tool for additional analysis. Learn more about the difference between BTM and APM.

Yes. OpTier has a very different approach to transaction profiling. OpTier BTM tracks every single transaction on every tier (in the application's container and at the operating system level), without the sampling or statistical correlation employed by other approaches. The OpTier BTM solution is also unique in that it tracks the business context of the transaction, collects resource utilization metrics per transaction, and automatically discovers all changes in the transaction flow.

Whereas other vendors offer transaction path snapshots that provide a very vague picture of the lower layers of infrastructure - physical or virtual - OpTier BTM provides a detailed picture of these lower layers. For example, identification of the application, the server, and the virtual hosts per each transaction instance, as well as an aggregated view per transaction type and business service.

The fact that an application’s execution path can follow a different course each time means that the transaction path snapshots from other vendors will have limited validity unless multiple snapshots are overlaid on top of one another and an aggregate trace is generated. Even then, it is possible for transaction paths to gradually change over time meaning that the extracts need to be recreated on a regular basis.

In contrast, OpTier uses Transaction Flow Detection to provide a continuous living topology. The transaction flow model is continuously and automatically kept up to date and so is the dependency map.

Yes. OpTier BTM discovers application components in several different ways in order to provide a complete, and up to date, transaction view:

• Automatic discovery of business flows among application components based on real traffic across components, with no need to model or predefine expected transaction paths.
• Automatic discovery of all components on which the solution is installed, as well as all surrounding component containers, based on interception of requests and responses via known protocols. Dozens of protocols are supported out-of-the-box, and support for additional protocols can be added using the CoreFirst API.
• Ability to compare real business flow topologies from different time periods to analyze the impact of application and/or configuration change.

OpTier automatically and continuously discovers all business transaction paths providing a real-time topology map of the links between IT components and business services. This map provides valuable information about how each transaction flows over each tier (e.g. time spent at each step, resource consumption cost per transaction, CPU utilized). It often reveals transaction flows that were unknown to customers.

Other solutions enable you to manually build a static dashboard representing the general flow of transactions through the environment - usually without valuable information about transaction flows and with no ability to group transactions into business processes. Configuration is generally cumbersome, and transactions to be monitored must be defined and grouped and manually updated. Transactions that are not discovered during this setup process will remain under the radar forever.

OpTier BTM puts the information from server, network and system monitors into the context of business transactions. System monitors report symptoms and events at the IT infrastructure component level – for example, indicating that CPU consumption is rising on a server or that a network segment is congested. BTM reveals which users, transactions and applications are using that server and network segment and can, therefore, help IT to prevent outages and handle changes effectively.

OpTier BTM automatically tracks and monitors business transactions and measures resource consumption metrics for the entire transaction and separately for each tier. For example, CoreFirst can show that the “Login” transaction that represents only 2% of the transaction workload of a given application consumes 25% of the overall resources consumed by the application.

OpTier BTM can provide transaction resource consumption data to capacity planning solutions and allow organizations to truly plan for capacity based on business usage targets (for example, a 20% increase in transactional volume from Paris).

OpTier pioneered the BTM market back in 2002, and continues to be the technology and market share leader of BTM with more than half a billion transactions assured by OpTier software on a daily basis. OpTier is recognized by leading analyst firms as the leader in this market, with:

• Low overhead (proven in high performance environments)
• Scalability to keep up with peak load
• Support for all transactions (e.g. asynchronous transactions, multi-threaded applications)
• Breadth of support (e.g. middleware, mainframes)
• Ease of deployment
• Wealth of happy customers achieving significant ROI

Successful implementations of BTM require a vendor with a mature full-featured solution, solid financial backing, and a track record of success. That is why OpTier is the leading vendor in the BTM market.

OpTier BTM provides three methods of instrumentation to accommodate the diverse needs and environments of customers:

• Lightweight Active Context Agent (ACT) deployed on the server in the application infrastructure
• Agentless metric collection via OpTier’s unique Observed Tier capability – monitors a server by passively observing the traffic in and out of the server
• Agentless monitoring of network traffic by OpTier Experience Manager for collection of information between the end user and the data center

The overhead for running the BTM agent is no more than 5%. Often the range is from 1%-3%

Below is a partial list of platforms supported in open systems and mainframe environments. We are constantly adding more! Please contact an OpTier representative for the complete listing.

• Web pages and web page components
• Desktop interfaces
• Any end-user device using HTTP/HTTPS, including mobile devices
• Non-HTTP rich clients (using the Experience Manager API)