What happened to my transaction?

Business transaction management and IT responsiveness

Table of contents
Transactions not technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Things fall apart: A payments use case. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Poor visibility leading to a lack of business/IT alignment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
What is needed: Business transaction management for better alignment . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Just like FedEx. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Complete transaction visibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
End-user visibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Real-time monitoring. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Historical analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Auto discovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Business-focused KPIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
HP Software for business transaction management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Find out more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Transactions not
technology
After years of evolution, most IT organizations operate
in highly complex multi-tier computing environments
that combine a wide array of technologies to support
increasingly intricate business transactions. These
technologies range from mainframe applications to
the latest composite applications built to run in the
context of a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
As businesses continue to outsource key services to
third-party vendors, the mix of technologies that must
be combined to support any given transaction only
increases the complexity.
This puts IT between a rock and a hard place: The
more businesses seek to wield IT as a competitive
weapon through automated back office and customer
facing transactions in a 24x7 business world, the
more difficult it is for IT to deliver. If IT is to be the
engine for business growth, the transactions that
make businesses run must be managed in the context
of the highly complex landscapes with which most
IT organizations struggle. In such an environment,
traditional approaches to monitoring tend to fall short.
The approach is either too narrow (focusing on the
performance of specific applications or infrastructure
components in isolation) or too wide (focusing on
transactions in the aggregate to reveal general
trends). What is needed is an approach to monitoring
transactions that is both broad and deep—an
approach that targets business concerns by helping
IT understand what is happening right here, right now
with any given transaction at any given time.
To meet this challenge, organizations are turning to the
concept of business transaction management (BTM).
BTM allows IT organizations to detect and resolve
problems at the business transaction level (online
purchases, stock trades, and travel reservations).
The point is that business is conducted at the level
of individual transactions—and IT needs visibility
into and control over these transactions and their
impact on business outcomes in order to properly
support the larger organization it serves. Whether it
is a customer-facing online transaction that forms the
basis of how a business interacts with its customers
or an automated back-office batch process that
runs on a scheduled basis, BTM helps IT understand
how the components in the IT infrastructure relate to
the business transactions they support. This, in turn,
can help the business understand the risk of failure for
a given transaction, proactively alert IT of approaching
deadlines, and monitor activities according to
business-focused key performance indicators (KPIs)
that better align IT with business objectives.
Things fall apart: A payments use case
Let us say that you are a large bank offering a
popular payments service to customers all over the
world. This service allows merchants, large and
small, to quickly process credit card payments. What
differentiates the service is the relative ease and
speed with which money can be transferred into your
customers’ online bank accounts.
Two weekends before Christmas, at the height of the
holiday shopping season, the service goes down.
None of your customers are able to complete their
credit card processing transactions online. Your help
desk gets flooded with a tsunami of calls. You cannot
handle the load, so you post a recorded message
explaining that your payments system is down, that
you are working with IT 24x7 to resolve the issue and
that at the current time it is impossible to predict when
the service will resume.
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Your customers are losing money by the minute.
Angry, they converge to online discussion boards
where they air their frustrations and share stories of
similar outages in the recent past. It becomes obvious
that this is not an isolated case, and much of the
discussion revolves around which of your competitors
might provide a more reliable service. It does not help
that many of your customers are also upset about your
lack of response. According to an online news outlet,
your press office was unable to either confirm or deny
the outages or offer any details regarding plans to
avoid the problem in the future. Back on the discussion
boards the hottest new topic is how your customers
can act collectively to demand compensation.
What went wrong?
Poor visibility leading to a lack of
business/IT alignment
In this scenario, IT lacks the visibility required to detect
individual transaction failures and avoid a business
fiasco. Due to the complexity of the environment in
which it operates, IT is unable to see the connections
between specific steps in individual transactions and
the technology components supporting them. This
creates a dangerous blind spot for the business—
one that is difficult to overcome with traditional
infrastructure and application monitoring tools. When
customers begin to experience problems, IT is late to
the game. And when customers start to call into the
desk, IT has no way of drilling down to the root cause
of the problem, no way of quickly analyzing specific
details that could lead to quick problem resolution. In
many cases, neither the business nor IT knows if the
problem is even worth solving or how much is really
at risk. Is the issue isolated to a specific region, a
particular group of merchants, or identifiable points
of sale? Is it related to a specific step within the
transaction? Is it happening only at specific times?
Who is impacted? How much is the outage really
costing the business? Most IT organizations are
hard pressed to provide answers to these kinds of
questions. Yet, this is exactly the sort of information
the business needs—and it cannot afford to wait
until the end of the month for IT to manually generate
performance reports.
According to a recent Ziff Davis survey, “42 percent
of customers surveyed said transactions lost in
mainframe and distributed systems is the most painful
problem to resolve.” After all, if IT cannot see the
business problem, IT cannot fix it. In the scenario
discussed here, IT lacks visibility into the end-to-end
health of business processes and the flow of business
transactions that support them. The result is a paucity
of information regarding the impact of transaction
failure on the business and its customers—and a
high likelihood that IT resources will be assigned to
lower priority activities. In the end, IT has no other
recourse than to delve deep into application logs
and similar technical data in a time-consuming,
resource-intensive attempt to correlate technical events
at the infrastructure level to the root cause of the
problem at the transaction level. With no real insight
into projected downtime, the business can only tell its
customers that it continues to work on the issue—and
this serves as little comfort to customers and partners
who remain stranded and unable to conduct business.
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With a BTM solution in place, businesses obtain
visibility into business transaction processing
that corresponds to that achieved by overnight
delivery services. Organizations can know
where every transaction is at every second
of every day.
What is needed:
Business transaction
management for better
alignment
In many ways, BTM can be seen as the next step in
the larger practice of business service management
(BSM). BSM focuses at the highest level where business
activities are coordinated to provide a single service
to customers—for example, a cell phone activation
service. BTM focuses on the individual service
transactions and the specific activities involved in
delivery—for example, removing the cell phone from
inventory or activating it for customer use. Accordingly,
BTM is concerned with how organizations can actually
track and measure individual transactions as they
progress through the enterprise—from end-user to
back office and wherever the transactions leads. The
information gathered from BTM reveals the health
and the flow of transactions, allowing IT to spot and
reduce bottlenecks and to fine-tune end-to-end system
performance. It also makes it possible for IT to display
business details such as the customer involved or the
monetary value of an individual transaction. This
enables business managers to prioritize transactions
and make problem resolution decisions based on an
understanding of business impact.
BTM can also help IT be far more proactive. For
example, BTM solutions can proactively alert IT
regarding approaching deadlines for individual
transactions such as orders or payments. In the case
of peak loads or service oversubscriptions, a BTM
solution can also notify IT instantaneously to properly
provision and budget for actual business demand
levels that might occur suddenly—as might happen
with seasonal promotions. In the end, this gives IT the
power to detect potential problems before they impact
business performance—and this is a large part of
what business wants from IT.
Just like FedEx
A useful analogy for BTM comes from the overnight
package delivery business. For years companies such
as UPS, FedEx and DHL have used technology to track
packages through each step of the delivery process.
With complete visibility into the exact location of every
package at every stage of delivery, these companies
have valuable insight into the health of each delivery
transaction. Where there is a problem, they can
identify the precise stage where it occurred. They can
also answer customer queries in an instant and reduce
risk by tracking high-value shipments to verify that they
stay on schedule.
Here, technical information takes a back seat to
business information. For example, data on how
fast bar codes are transferred into a database and
aggregated for ongoing data analysis may be
important information for the business, but it can in no
way serve as a substitute for information on the flow
of a given package as it moves through the delivery
process. Similarly, metrics on the throughput rate of
a given application server (a typical measurement in
the context of traditional approached to infrastructure
monitoring) cannot substitute for real-time data on the
status of a business-critical transaction. Imagine for a
moment that a package you have ordered is late, and
when you call customer service to complain you are
told that the problem must be on your end because
all trucks and planes are running just fine. For most
up-to-date customer-driven logistics services, this would
not happen. But in other parts of the business world,
where IT attempts to monitor transactions by focusing
solely on the aggregate status of the technology
components, this is precisely what you get.
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With a BTM solution in place, businesses obtain defined performance thresholds, IT needs service
visibility into business transaction processing that dependency mapping capabilities that represent how
corresponds to that achieved by overnight delivery specific IT issues really influence the transaction. This
services. Organizations can know where every helps IT to quickly drill down to the root cause of the
transaction is at every second of every day. To resolve problem and correlate low-level technology issues
problems, IT can drill down to the tracking information to the potential business/financial impact. It also
to see the breakdown of processing time at each helps IT proactively detect potential problems before
step and determine if a transaction has encountered transactions fail and even avoid actions that are likely
problems. IT can also receive alerts based on to cause problems down the road. For example, IT can
divergence from critical business conditions. All of this evaluate which transactions would be impacted by
tracking data, of course, can be aggregated to provide executing proposed change processes, thus helping
an operational view of the entire business process and to prevent unexpected outages and head off negative
the transaction processing infrastructure. This can help business outcomes.
IT isolate trouble spots causing delays or failures while
A real-world example taken from a European bank helps
serving as a foundation for proactive notification.
to illustrate the importance of end-to-end transaction
visibility. Each evening, this bank automatically executed
Complete transaction visibility
a critical batch process to make good on funds it had
The central requirement for any successful BTM initiative borrowed on an overnight basis the day before. One
is broad and deep visibility into the transactions the evening, a single transaction failed to complete. To
business runs. As shown in the above example, IT its great embarrassment, the bank notified the central
needs to understand how each step in any given bank of the transaction failure and paid the associated
transaction relates to the infrastructure components that penalties. Soon thereafter, the bank discovered that the
support them. The objective is to be able to monitor the transaction in question involved a relatively insignificant
transaction lifespan across the initiate, execute, and amount of money—less than the penalty itself. At the very
complete phases. Complete visibility means the ability least, with improved real-time visibility and understanding
to answer questions that are important to the business: of the business context of the transaction, the bank would
Where is my payment? Did the order go through? How have understood the financial reality of the situation
long did it take? Were there any errors or performance much sooner and might have decided not to pay the
issues that may have impacted the customer experience? penalty. But more important than the sums involved was

This level of visibility can be achieved by collecting the issue of reputation. The transaction failure described
data from key steps in individual transactions. here caused the bank to lose a degree of credibility with
Collected data can also be aggregated into the central bank. It would have been better to avoid the
business-focused metrics so that IT can constantly problem in the first place—something the bank could
determine the transaction’s health and business impact. have done with individual transaction monitoring and
Where errors are detected or metrics dip below alert mechanisms that would have tipped IT off in time to
rectify the problem.

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Real-time monitoring capabilities should be robust
enough to report not only when a transaction
fails but also to detect abnormal execution paths
and whether or not the content of the transaction
meets proper business requirements.

End-user visibility In addition, by zeroing in on the number of users and

Back office batch processes are one thing; end users
are another. The fact is, there is no way to predict
what a live person will do when interacting with
your systems. And when many of these end users are
customers, achieving end-user visibility becomes a
business-critical activity.
Monitoring the end-user experience should be done
through the combined use of both synthetic and
real-user monitors. Synthetic monitors are recorded
procedures that continuously execute defined
transactions from various access points inside and
outside your network. Where issues arise, these
monitors report back to IT in the form of early warning
alerts, allowing both IT and business to react before
customers or other end users feel the impact. One
bank in Asia, for example, uses synthetic monitoring
to test banking transactions before the bulk of its
customers come online at the start of the business day.
This has helped the bank maintain exceptionally high
service levels resulting in greater customer retention.
Real-user monitoring allows IT to capture the actual
real-time customer experience by monitoring all users
from all locations all the time. An unobtrusive probe
listens to incoming network traffic and feeds the data
it collects into an analysis engine. This engine then
generates usable information on a variety of customer
experience metrics such as transaction round-trip time,
application availability, errors experienced and more.
Real-user monitors are also extremely helpful for
incident resolution because help-desk agents can
access the actual web pages from the customer’s
actual session when a problem arises. The agent
can then significantly enrich the ticket with valuable
information that helps lead to a faster resolution.
the specific IP domains tied to an incident, IT staff can
effectively measure business impact and take action
to maintain quality of experience standards on a
continuous basis.
In our payments example described earlier, better
end-user visibility could have helped the bank
providing the credit card processing service to detect
problems before the system crashed. It could have also
provided valuable information on who experienced
the problem, what step in the process caused the
problem, and the location of users reporting trouble.
With this sort of information on hand, IT can resolve
issues faster and provide more accurate downtime
estimates to the user community.
Real-time monitoring
Without the ability to identify transaction problems as
they occur in real time, IT will be constantly constrained
in its ability to properly serve the business as it focuses
on priorities that have little impact on true business
outcomes. Real-time monitoring capabilities should be
robust enough to report not only when a transaction
fails but also to detect abnormal execution paths and
whether or not the content of the transaction meets
proper business requirements. Returning again to our
payments example, the bank in question would have
benefited tremendously from real-time monitoring as
an early warning system. Unfortunately, the bank’s
first notice came from angry customers calling into the
help desk. Customer retention issues aside, it’s worth
remembering that customers are the most expensive
monitors a business can have. When customers are
forced to call into the help desk, this drives up support
costs and negatively impacts the bottom line—something
real-time monitoring can help organizations avoid.

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Historical analysis This makes auto discovery of transaction flows a
virtual requirement for effective BTM in the real world.
Just as real-time monitoring has its place in BTM, the
With auto discovery capabilities, IT does not start
same is true for historical analysis. By aggregating
from the untenable assumption that there exists a
transaction data over time and mining it for useful
single model that describes all possible transaction
information, IT can evaluate transactions, address
flows. Rather an auto discovery tool monitors the IT
chronic infrastructure problems, and drive continuous
environment and discovers the actual transaction
improvements over time. This can help IT make better
paths, instance by instance, as it observes them
capacity-planning decisions, streamline processes
executing across the enterprise. The result is a
for cost reductions, and speed the time required to
constantly updated representation of your actual
resolve performance issues. This information is just
transaction flow as opposed to a rarified description
as important to business people as it is to IT because
of how IT and the business think the transactions
it allows the business to see the value, risk and costs
should flow. Based on this information, IT gets an
associated with IT-enabled processes. Armed with this
actual snapshot of the transaction environment—one
knowledge, business people can better plan for the
that serves as the foundation for effective BTM and as
future and create real value that can positively impact
a starting point for continuous improvements.
the bottom line. For example, the business can use
this information to help customers track payments or
Business-focused KPIs
monitor order status. It can also analyze transaction
data to evaluate the ability of suppliers to deliver KPIs are an essential tool for improving business/IT
high-quality service—an increasingly important issue alignment. But to be meaningful to the business, these
for businesses that seek to prevent customer attrition, KPIs should be focused on business concerns rather
protect shareholder value and maintain brand loyalty. than technology concerns. Prevailing approaches to
KPIs are limited to IT metrics such as server uptime
Auto discovery or network throughput rates. To make matters worse,
these metrics are often aggregated in manual fashion
Early attempts at BTM required organizations to
using a spreadsheet. This impedes IT’s ability to drill
manually model the complex flows of their enterprise
down to the required level of granularity and tie
transactions. Predictably, this labor-intensive,
specific metrics back to the systems from which they
error-prone approach to BTM proved so difficult that
were captured. BTM can help address these issues by
many organizations have simply abandoned the
enabling IT to define business-focused KPIs—such as
effort. For companies that managed to finalize their
activation rates for cell phones to provide just a single
initial models, maintenance has stood in the way of
example. These metrics, in turn, can be tied to the
prolonged success. When transactions change at the
lower-level systems and technologies that remain the
speed of business itself, the task of keeping transaction
proper concern of IT. This enables IT to communicate
flow models up-to-date tends to get pushed to the
with the business in business terms—while still giving it
back burner while IT focuses on issue of more pressing
the ability to drill down into transactions and identify
concern. Furthermore, solutions that map transaction
root problems wherever required.
instances to an expected flow often do not handle
unexpected departures from the model gracefully.

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 HP Software for business • Proactively alert on approaching deadlines for
individual transactions.

transaction management • Mine historical data collected over time to diagnose

business processes, analyze infrastructure problems
To better meet the demands of the business it serves, and drive long-term investments.
IT ultimately needs a way to track each step of each • Monitor individual real users to see exactly what
transaction across multiple technologies—all in the each user sees, and gain insight into user behavior
context of highly distributed application environments patterns and anomalies.
supported simultaneously by a wide array of third-party • Measure and report on business-centric key KPIs.
business entities that make up today’s complex value
chains. This is what HP Software can help you achieve. HP Business Availability Center supports all of your
BTM requirements. Its capabilities help you reduce
With HP Software solutions supporting your BTM lost revenue and lower business risk by facilitating the
initiative, you’ll be able to: highest possible service levels for your customers.
• Gain visibility into every step along the transaction
path and how each step corresponds to technology
components in your IT infrastructure. Find out more
• Track transactions in real time to head off performance To learn more about how HP Software can help you
degradations and negative business outcomes. monitor and manage transactions more effectively,
• Quickly determine the business impact of transaction call your HP representative today or visit us online at
failures and performance problems with intuitive www.hp.com/go/btosoftware
business impact analysis tools.

Technology for better business outcomes

To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/btosoftware
© Copyright 2008–2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject
to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty
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4AA1-8530ENW Rev. 1, March 2009