Getting a handle on transaction mgmt.

As enterprise applications grow more sophisticated and evolve to support environments with service-oriented architectures, a new breed of management software is growing up to manage the transactions that make these applications run.

Transaction-management software measures transactions' performance along the many hops an application makes between a user request and back-end systems. The software captures response-time metrics, application content errors and system workload details that help reduce performance problems in real time. Essentially, it's application performance-management software - on steroids.

Transaction-management software, for instance, homes in on the exact SQL query to a database that caused an application to slow down. In contrast, application performance management software might only send an alert that the database is the source of the problem. Without the transaction management software notification, IT managers could spend hours searching system logs to discover the error on the database.

Unlike many application performance management products available - which often manage the application based on the performance of the server hosting it - transaction management software monitors the application across multiple tiers as it fulfills a user request. A typical implementation requires multiple agents installed along the application path and a central repository to aggregate and correlate the data to determine the exact source of a performance problem. A notification feature alerts IT managers when performance thresholds aren't met.

"Transaction management technology could include the monitoring of transaction response times, the monitoring of resources used in performing the transaction and the quality of the data that is returned as a result of the transaction," says Jean-Pierre Garbani, a research director at Forrester Research. "These tools were originally aimed at Web-based transactions, then [Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition] apps to packaged apps, and now are spreading to legacy, or mainframe, applications."

For instance, transaction management software could provide detailed response-time information on everything from the network, database and servers to a user's machine. The software also helps developers build applications to run more smoothly on distributed networks. Because of that, some industry watchers say the technology could be used as a tool to bridge IT operations staff working to catch a performance problem.

Management software makers such as IBM and HP provide software applications that go beyond managing host servers to see deeper into specific transactions and help IT managers resolve performance issues more quickly and build better applications from the start. BMC Software and CA in the past year increased their transaction-management portfolios with the acquisitions of Identify Software and Wily Technology, respectively.

As a result, BMC earlier this year launched a product portfolio including two new applications: Transaction Management Application Response Time, which monitors applications on client machines to get a read of performance as the user would experience it; and Mainview Transaction Analyzer, which tracks transactions on IBM mainframes. In addition, newcomer OpTier launched its company on the premise that more customers would be looking to manage transaction workloads.