Transaction Monitoring

Transaction Monitoring – The Four Approaches You know that your Enterprise is in dire need of a Transaction Monitoring solution; transaction latencies are in the sky, some transactions do not even make it, mysterious bottlenecks pop up, users call in with complaints, Transaction Monitoring is unavoidable. The problem is, when you look at all of the Transaction Monitoring solutions out there, they all look the same. Every product website that offers a Transaction Monitoring solution makes the same claims; “end to end transaction monitoring”, “full visibility into transactions”, “link IT to business processes”, “low overhead”, “perform root cause analysis”, “find application performance problems before they impact your clients” and so on. How on Earth are you expected to make heads from tails when it comes to finding the Transaction Monitoring approach that is right for you? The following article will make Transaction Monitoring much clearer – bear with us, this is not going to be short.

Transaction Monitoring’s Four Solution Types 1. Network Appliances – Includes all solutions that collect data by non-intrusively “listening” to network traffic

2. “Deep Dive” Profilers – J2EE/.NET Code Instrumentation – Includes all solutions that use

Bytecode Instrumentations (or Java/.NET Hooks) in order to collect thorough code level metrics.

3. End User Monitoring – The approach that utilizes End User latencies either by connecting an appliance to the network at the web server or by installing agents on the client side.

4. Agent Based Transaction Tracing – Solutions where agents are installed on all relevant tiers and all transactions are traced everywhere.

Transaction Monitoring With Network Appliances What they do They perform Transaction Monitoring by network sniffing in order to identify application events (or transaction segments), and then reconstruct the whole transaction by fuzzy matching. How they do it Network appliance solutions usually connect to a port mirror in order to collect the traffic, and then try and re-construct the entire transaction. Information needs to be collected directly from every node that is of interest. Main Advantage Transaction Monitoring by connection to the network means that they add no overhead and are simple to install. Main Drawback Transaction Monitoring has to be done by an algorithmic approach since they cannot collect data directly from the servers, which leads to inaccurate transaction metrics and topology. Sharepath vs. Network Appliance Solutions • Sharepath can provide data from within the servers enabling the collection of things like resource consumption and all of the actual parameters of the

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transaction segment without the need for fuzzy matching which can be inaccurate. Sharepath’s technology enables it to be much more flexible, it can be very non invasive, simple recording what goes in and comes out of the server, and it can dive in to collect metrics from encrypted data packets for instance.

Transaction Monitoring by Diving Deep into the Java/.NET Code What they do These Transaction Monitoring tools provide deep diagnostics into Java applications – to the code level. They are used by J2EE/.NET experts in order to locate problems before deployment. How they do it Transaction Monitoring is done by bytecode instrumentations (or Java hooks) that retrieve data from the nodes that are running J2EE/.NET applications. This is done by utilizing the class loading mechanism of the interpreter (JVM for J2EE or CLR for .NET) that in order to intercept specific classes or method calls within the application. Main Advantage Lots of rich information for developers, this type of Transaction Monitoring will bring up the specific line of code that is the cause of the problem. Main Drawback Transaction Monitoring cannot be done for all of the transactions running on the system (up to 10% for short periods of time), implementations are lengthy and invasive, and the person ultimately responsible for application performance will get a heart attack when they see all of the massive amounts of information retrieved that they will have no idea what to do with. Sharepath vs. “Deep Dive” • Cannot load test at full capacity during development, or monitor all transactions during production like Sharepath can with its very low overhead • Sharepath can be used with one of the many J2EE and .NET profilers that are available in the market today (some are for free) in order to aid application development before deployment. • Sharepath can be used by IT operations and infrastructure teams because of its ease of use and high level view. • Sharepath traces transactions at all tiers, providing a full topology of the transaction flow, while this solution provides metrics only at the application server and has limited horizontal visibility. • Sharepath’s architecture is environment independent and can be deployed on any server, not just the .NET or J2EE server. • Sharepath’s technology is based on process wrapping and is therefore noninvasive, which enables fast and clean implementation.

Transaction Monitoring with the Help of Users

What they do This transaction monitoring approach is based on managing the application by monitoring the end user response times and then performing customer analytics and system heuristics from the web server outward. How they do it There are two general strategies to implement transaction monitoring with this approach; the first is by installing an agent on the user’s computer (either on the desktop or in the browser with the help of a java script) and the second is by installing a network appliance on the web server. Some solutions (like Gomez for instance) have servers around the world that test performance from different regions (ping discipline). Main Advantage Know what your clients are experiencing – transaction monitoring with this approach enables you to put customers first. Main Drawback Transaction monitoring stops at the web server, the few solutions that let you peek beyond that can only provide very limited metrics. You will know that there is a problem, but you will have no idea where to look for it. Sharepath vs. Real End User Monitoring • Sharepath can be extended with an end user monitoring solution in order to cover all bases • Sharepath locates the specific location of problems as opposed to only alerting about them, providing important insight and saving time for the application team • These products do not provide much information in the development phase, with Sharepath; you can test your application pre-deployment.

Agent Based Transaction Monitoring What they do Software agents are deployed along the application path across the different tiers so that a unified view of the entire application can be provided. What characterizes these solutions is that the full flow of every single one of the transactions running on the system is recorded in real time (thousands of transactions a second). This solution is just as valuable to the IT management team as it is for the Application Development team. How they do it Agents installed at each tier send data collected to a central repository where it is processed. Agents may be installed with the help of JVM/CLR instrumentations at the application server (one technical execution approach) or they may be installed as kernel modules (drivers), shared objects (Unix), .dll files (Windows) at the operating system level. Agents may also be installed at databases, MQ middleware servers and legacy mainframe computers. Every event (or transaction segment) is recorded along with all of its real parameters and then accurately re-constructed.

Main Advantage Transaction Monitoring is done all the time for every single transaction, this is the only true end to end solution that includes the middle and all of the important data that is to be collected from the servers in a way that does not weigh down the system. Main Disadvantage By themselves these Transaction Monitoring solutions cannot get deep into the code or see what is happening at the user’s browser. Sharepath vs. the Other Guy • Sharepath’s deployment is faster and is not as labor intensive as other BTM solutions that need to perform code instrumentations • Sharepath can be easily used by anyone, it’s the more simple and elegant solution • Sharepath works at the operating system level (wraps processes as opposed to bytecode instrumentation) and is therefore environment independent • Residing at the OS level means that Sharepath can better monitor resource consumption beyond CPU consumption (IO, network, and can be customized to collect anything).

What Transaction Monitoring was meant to be Now don’t take our word for it, talk to people that have been using solutions offered by the “big four” and others. One look at our online demo and you will immediately see how simple Sharepath is to use. Contact us so that we can address the problems that are specific to your Enterprise, at Correlsense we are willing to bend over backwards to support your every need, customization is no problem and Sharepath has been designed to be flexible.