IBM Tivoli digs deeper into app transactions

IBM Tivoli last week announced it has upgraded its application performance management software to more accurately identify network troubles and speed problem resolution.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance (TMTP) 5.3 monitors application traffic as it flows through a network to provide detailed response time information on application transactions. The product uses server and agent software installed across an infrastructure on Web, application and database servers, as well as on end-user clients, to determine application response times. The software collects the data, correlates it, compares it against pre-set desired response times, and alerts staff when transaction thresholds are missed.

The new version includes more application, server and standards support that let the software provide specific information to help customers optimize application performance, the company says. For example, with this release, IBM Tivoli announced integration with Siebel Server 7.7, which provides TMTP software with Siebel instrumentation specifics, such as how the Siebel server should be configured or how it should communicate with applications. That information could be used by TMTP to pinpoint an error's cause. Rather than IT managers looking through logs from multiple systems to find the cause of poor response time, the software would point out that the problem was caused by a configuration error on the Siebel server.

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IBM Tivoli last week announced it has upgraded its application performance management software to more accurately identify network troubles and speed problem resolution.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance (TMTP) 5.3 monitors application traffic as it flows through a network to provide detailed response time information on application transactions. The product uses server and agent software installed across an infrastructure on Web, application and database servers, as well as on end-user clients, to determine application response times. The software collects the data, correlates it, compares it against pre-set desired response times, and alerts staff when transaction thresholds are missed.

The new version includes more application, server and standards support that let the software provide specific information to help customers optimize application performance, the company says. For example, with this release, IBM Tivoli announced integration with Siebel Server 7.7, which provides TMTP software with Siebel instrumentation specifics, such as how the Siebel server should be configured or how it should communicate with applications. That information could be used by TMTP to pinpoint an error's cause. Rather than IT managers looking through logs from multiple systems to find the cause of poor response time, the software would point out that the problem was caused by a configuration error on the Siebel server.

"The more information software can collect across the infrastructure and from specific applications, the more likely it can automate problem detection and in some cases, resolution," says Audrey Rasmussen, a vice president at Enterprise Management Associates.

In addition to Siebel integration, the company added support for more infrastructure components, such as Web services, Web servers, IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS), IBM IMS (a database and transaction management system), IBM DB2 and SAP back-end services. TMTP also uses the The Open Group's standard, which lets the software collect transaction response time data directly from applications, servers and network devices. The more data the software can collect, the better, industry experts say.

"IBM realizes customers need to be able to measure how systems use applications and how well transactions perform across the infrastructure to enable autonomic and utility computing," says Corey Ferengul, a vice president at Meta Group. This release of TMTP is a step in that direction, he says, because in order to automate fixes along the lines of IBM's plans to develop self-healing systems, the software first must understand how applications communicate with infrastructure components on a transaction level.

Yet IBM Tivoli will have to continue to add application-specific support, as well as more platform support to win customers' dollars from competing vendors such as BMC, Mercury Interactive and Wily Technology.

"Products that measure application performance need to do more than collect data from the infrastructure: They need to show where performance falls down," Rasmussen says.