Focusing on Business Transactions is a Proven Best Practice

August 28 2014
 

Business Transactions are vital to your application performance monitoring. Read More


In today’s software-defined business era, uptime and availability are key to the business survival. The application is the business. However, ensuring proper application performance remains a daunting task for their production environments, where do you start?

Enter Business Transactions.

By starting to focus on the end-user experience and measuring application performance based on their interactions, we can correctly gauge how the entire environment is performing. We follow each individual user request as it flows through the application architecture, comparing the response time to its optimal performance. This inside-out strategy allows AppDynamics to instantly identify performance bottlenecks and allows application owners to get to the root-cause of issues that much faster.
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By becoming business transaction-centric application owners can ensure uptime and availability even within a challenging application environment. Business transactions give them the insight that’s required in order to react to quickly changing conditions and respond accordingly.

So, what exactly is a Business Transaction?

Simply: any and every online user request.

Consider a business transaction to be a user-generated action within your system. The best practice for determining the performance of your application isn’t to measure CPU usage, but to track the flow of a transaction that your customer, the end user, has requested.

It can be requests such as:

  • logging in
  • adding an item to a cart
  • checking out
  • searching for an item
  • navigating different tabs
  • Shifting your focus to business transactions completely changes the game in terms of your ability to support application performance.

    Business Transactions and APM

    Business Transactions equip application owners with three important advantages.

    Knowledge of User Experience

    If a business transaction is a “user-generated action,” then it’s pretty clear how monitoring business transactions can have a tremendous effect on your ability to understand the experience of your end user.

    If your end user adds a book to a shopping cart, is the transaction performing as expected or is it taking 3 seconds longer? (And what kind of impact will that have on end users? Will they decide to surf away and buy books somewhere else, thus depriving your business of not just the immediate purchase but the potential loss of lifetime customer revenue?)

    Monitoring business transactions gives you a powerful insight into the experience of your end user.

    Service Assurance – the ability to track baseline performance metrics

    AppDynamics hears from our clients all the time that it’s difficult to know what “normal” actually is. This is particularly true in an ever-changing application environment. If you try to determine normal performance by correlating code-level metrics – while at the same time reacting to frequent code drops – you will never get there.

    Business transactions offer a Service Assurance constant that you can use for ongoing monitoring. The size of your environment may change and the number of nodes may come and go, but by focusing on business transactions as your ongoing metric, you can begin to create baseline performance for your application. Understanding this baseline performance is exactly what you need in order to understand whether your application is running as expected and desired, or whether it’s completely gone off the rails.

    For example, you may have a sense of how your application is supposed to perform. But do you really know how it performs every Sunday at 6 p.m.? Or the last week of December? And if you don’t, how will you know when the application is deviating from acceptable performance? It’s figuring out “normal” in terms of days, weeks, and even seasons that you need to truly understand your application’s baseline performance.

    Triage & Diagnosis – always knowing where to look to solve problems

    Finally, when problems occur, business transactions prevent you from hunting through logs and swimming through lines of code. The transaction’s poor performance immediately shines a spotlight on the problem – and your ability to get to root cause quickly is dramatically improved.

    If you’re tracking code-level metrics in a large environment instead of monitoring business transactions, the chances are that the fire you’re troubleshooting is going to roar out of hand before you’re able to douse it.

    Summary

    Application owners are under extraordinary pressure to incorporate frequent code changes while still being held responsible for 100% application uptime and performance. In a distributed and rapidly changing environment, meeting these high expectations becomes tremendously challenging.

    A strong focus on business transactions becomes absolutely essential for maintaining application performance. Transaction-centric monitoring provides the basis for a stable performance assurance metric, it delivers powerful insights into user experience, and it ensures the ability to know where to hunt during troubleshooting.

    The right APM solution can automate much of this work. It can help application owners identify and bucket their business transactions, as well as assist with triage, troubleshooting, and root cause diagnosis when transactions violate their performance baselines. In this way, business transactions are essential to ensuring the success of Developers, Operations, and Architects – anyone with a stake in application performance.

    Kevin Goldberg
    Kevin is the Senior Content Marketing Manager for AppDynamics. He's a longtime suffering San Diego Chargers and Padres fan. You can follow him on Twitter at @Kevin_Goldberg

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