With the recent worldwide recession, layoffs and cost-cutting efforts have turned the spotlight on IT infrastructure and how utilizing advancements in enterprise technology can bring greater efficiency to business transactions. The concurrent dawn of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), while promising great benefit, has actually added new challenges to the already demanding set of requirements for effective application management. In response to these changing conditions, businesses are starting to understand that proactive problem prevention can replace traditional strategies focused on fire-fighting.

In today's economy, IT is burdened with three commandments: reduce cost, improve service and manage risk. Nevertheless, IT personnel need to learn how to do more with less by finding ways to squeeze stealth waste out of business processes. They must also remember that competition still exists and they do have to be concerned with improvements to the quality of service their applications provide. And finally, they need to manage the risk that comes from potentially breaching an Service Level Agreements (SLA) or the bigger risk of customer attrition.

Every day, billions of business transactions flow back and forth from web-based applications through web servers, application servers, messaging technologies and back-end mainframe systems. While some emerging technologies are beginning to recognize the importance of proactive problem solving, most are stuck in reactive mode. Many don't provide the requisite visibility businesses need to effectively measure the impact of problems.

Now, businesses are beginning to recognize the power of applying a Business Transaction Performance (BTP) approach towards these issues. But how can monitoring business transaction performance help businesses prevent problems? How can this methodology provide the full visibility across operational performance, transactional performance and compliance to SLAs that is necessary to reduce cost, improve service and manage risk?

Challenges in Operational Efficiency

With the emergence of new applications based on SOA and Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), IT infrastructure complexity has grown with such force that added strain has been placed on operations and application support groups. Workforce cuts due to the economic environment and increasing demand for highly trained personnel have placed even greater strain on executives that recognize the need for cutting-edge IT functionality.

Operations groups usually have well-defined tools for dealing with network complexities and monitoring availability and performance from distributed servers' perspectives. Technology groups have their own diagnostic products, usually specific to the area of their domain expertise. However, many businesses have yet to see the value in providing end-to-end visibility into applications from transactional and business service perspectives to pinpoint potential performance bottlenecks.

New vendors are attempting to address this problem by providing transactional views of specific business processes spanning multiple technology tiers. Unfortunately, most of these companies are only providing a narrow perspective. Some may attempt to give a horizontal view, while others are focused on particular verticals.

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