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
 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 non-
invasive, 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.