BTM Tags and Agents

With the BTM Tags/Agents bar chart (ANALYZE > Graphs > Combined Bar Charts > BTM Tags/Agents) you can compare transactions and groups of computers with respect to availability, response times and number of requests for transactions reported by the PerformanceGuard Monitor Complex Activity with AutoSteps feature. By selecting multiple tags and computer groups you can compare combinations of these tags and groups.

Before you start

The BTM Tags/Agents menu item is only available if your PerformanceGuard licence includes BTM.

BTM, Business Transaction Monitoring, is a feature for monitoring complex activity that involve multiple steps and/or multiple servers. It essentially works as a stop watch that lets you record the time it takes to execute a complex activity. BTM is very flexible: PerformanceGuard provides a set of building blocks that your organization can use to integrate with other applications and define relevant transactions.

A transaction is some sort of complex activity that your organization wants to measure, for example how long time it takes to connect to a price database and update product prices. Due to the flexibility of BTM many types of activity can be measured as a transaction, depending on what’s relevant in your organization. If the names of transactions and transaction groups in your organization are not immediately meaningful to you, ask your PerformanceGuard administrator for advice.

Tip

This graph is useful because … you can compare transactions, including transactions across groups of computers. This way you can, for example, verify if all of your organization’s locations are able to carry out transactions without problems or delays.

Settings

Specify the settings on the Setup tab, and then click Update. The chart appears on the Graph tab.

• Transaction group: Transactions may grouped, for example into finance transactions, human resources transactions, etc. If that’s the case in your organization, select which group of transactions you want to base the graph on.
• Transaction: Select which transaction you want to base the graph on. If you selected a transaction group in the previous field, you can only select transactions from that group.
• Tags: Select which transaction tag (if any available) you want to view on the graph, or keep All Tags. You can select multiple tags by pressing the CTRL key while you select tags.

Important

What's a tag?

A transaction tag is used to identify a variant of a transaction. For example, if you have a transaction called Print, you could have a Color tag for color prints and a Grayscale tag for non-color prints. Tags are not always used, so don’t worry if you are not able to select any.

• Type: Determines which type of value the graph will contain, for example response times in seconds.
• Agents: Select which computer groups the bar chart should be based on, or keep All agents. You can select multiple groups by pressing the CTRL key while selecting groups.
• Domain: Select a domain to only include transactions from computers in that domain, or keep All Domains.
• Interval: Select the period of time that the graph should cover. If the predefined intervals don’t suit you, select Custom to Custom Time Periods on Graphs.
• X-axis Min and Max: Enter the required range for the bar chart’s horizontal axis. If you leave the fields empty, the range will automatically reflect the minimum and maximum values found in the data.

If you have selected one or more locations in Agents, the Split Agents button appears. Click it to replace the locations with their member groups, so that you can compare the groups.

Important

When is something considered to be available?

To answer this we need to look at response times: If response times are so long that use of a service, website, transaction or similar becomes impossible, PerformanceGuard considers the service, etc. to be unavailable. By default, PerformanceGuard loses its patience with a service, etc. if it hasn’t responded within 500,000 milliseconds (that’s a little more than eight minutes). Everything that’s not unavailable, is considered by PerformanceGuard to be available. So, if you see that a service has been 100% available during the last week, it means that it has not exceeded the acceptable response time limit during the last week.

Do you measure availability of application pings (HTTP requests, ICMP ping and/or traceroutes)? For application pings (see Agent Configuration Group Settings), PerformanceGuard looks not only at acceptable response times, but also at whether a response is expected or not: If the response is unexpected, for example if the response has a response code of 404 Not Found, PerformanceGuard considers the service to be unavailable, even if the response was received within acceptable time.