- Home
- Resource Library
- Articles
- BTM Compared to APM
How is OpTier BTM different from conventional Application Performance Management (APM) solutions?
OpTier BTM is a business transaction-driven solution for managing application performance. Because it puts the focus on business transactions, it has a number of advantages over conventional APM solutions.
The advantage of business transaction-driven APM:
- Always on, production-class solution
- Business transaction focus - built from the ground up to put data in business context
- Application diagnostics that provide just the right information without impacting overhead
- Automatic, continuous discovery of all transactions without manual modeling
- Problem identification on time, before outages occur
- Problem resolution based on alerts and accurate diagnostics
- Monitoring of all transactions, no sampling, so nothing is missed or lost
- Safer, more reliable change management
Always on: OpTier BTM monitors all instances of every business transaction, 24/7. It doesn't only monitor the end user experience – it monitors and captures each transaction as it flows across all of the infrastructure tiers. That means that nothing is missed, and everything is recorded for future analysis – so you can truly get to the source of a problem. In contrast, conventional APM tools monitor the end-user experience and trigger deep-dive analysis tools for the data center infrastructure only when an alarm is sounded. This approach does not give you a complete picture of the incident.
Business transaction focus: OpTier BTM was designed from the ground up to manage the performance of business transactions. It gives you a comprehensive, integrated view of how transactions are performing and behaving across IT silos. Of course you can drill down to view one tier – like your web server or your database – but the information you receive will always be in its business context. You will understand the precise impact of the error or performance problem on your users. Other APM solutions were designed as silo monitoring and analysis tools. On top of that, vendors have created a transaction or business-process layer. But they lack the cohesion of a purpose-built BTM solution. They tend to use sampling, correlation and stitching in order to display all of the data you need on some kind of dashboard.
Just the right information: OpTier BTM monitors all transactions, all the time, and captures the instances for future analysis. When an error or slowdown occurs, OpTier BTM also captures detailed application diagnostics to accelerate root cause analysis. You can configure precisely the amount of information you want to save but since it was designed to run in production, OpTier BTM typically has less than a 2% impact on overhead. Traditional APM deep-dive tools were designed for developers. They capture vast amounts of information and cannot run in production all the time. Instead, they are usually triggered. So you will not have a record of what happened immediately before the flag was raised. And you will have to wade through a tremendous amount of data in order to find what you need.
Complete auto-discovery: OpTier BTM auto-discovers each and every transaction type across every single tier without any manual development. Since the process is continuous, you always have an up-to-date view of the environment. OpTier also leverages this technology to calculate execution time between tiers which is crucial for detecting network problems. Some APM vendors offer solutions for discovering the IT infrastructure, however, many of these solutions have only a partial view of the environment and are not automatically kept up to date.
Problem identification: OpTier BTM detects application-tier performance breaches before they affect users. Since OpTier BTM monitors all transactions and SLAs in real-time on each tier, organizations can proactively avoid outages and slowdowns. APM solutions depend on end-user monitoring to detect problems at the point when they are already affecting users. While deep dive solutions can alert on threshold breaches of individual metrics (e.g. heap size, concurrency), a breach does not necessarily indicate impact on a business transaction. This can cause a constant “red-light” situation where alerts are so numerous that they are ignored.
Problem resolution: OpTier BTM shows what happened on each tier even before the problem started and puts the tier metrics into the context of the affected business transactions. OpTier BTM provides diagnostic information such as SQL statements, J2EE calling methods, mainframe CICS transactions so you can isolate and rectify the issue without the need to recreate it. Conventional APM solutions do not provide visibility into each step along the transaction path and since deep dive solutions are employed after a problem occurs, they will provide only a partial picture.
All transactions, no sampling: OpTier monitors all transactions without metric sampling. In contrast, conventional APM solutions often use a sampling approach (e.g. metrics are averaged over a 15 second period). Potential problems (e.g. quick spikes) can get "averaged-out", leading to outages or degradation in service performance. Deep dive solutions can be valuable for diagnostics – however, due to the large overhead in full collection mode, they will begin collecting all relevant data only after an alarm is triggered.
Change management: OpTier provides out-of-the-box views and reports that enable organizations to understand scalability issues on every tier and to compare the impact of application changes on utilization, performance and SLA compliance. OpTier enables organizations to assess, in advance, the business impact of any change and then correlates service outages and business impact with recent change requests. Because conventional APM only monitors the user experience and obtains deep dive data for exceptions, it does not have the information required to assess the impact of change on the performance and behavior of transactions in the new environment. While deep dive metrics from two different time periods can be compared, this data will be available from a different interface and will not have business process context.
Resources
Business Transaction Management by OpTier
OpTier's Business Transaction Management solution is designed to provide business application owners with real-time visibility into the performance and availability of critical business transactions. More business focused than application performance management or application monitoring solutions, OpTier BTM optimizes IT for business to deliver significant financial benefits from IT cost reduction to reduced risk of loss from critical outages. Optier BTM enables end-to-end transaction tracking across the enterprise. OpTier's Business Transaction Management suite is a leader in the IT Management space for providing efficient solutions for cloud computing, web application performance monitoring, end user monitoring, business service management and complex event processing.
