2.2 Introducing TMTP 5.2

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2.2 Introducing TMTP 5.2

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance Web Transaction Performance (TMTP WTP) is a centrally managed suite of software components that monitor the availability and performance of Web-based services and Microsoft® Windows applications. IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance captures detailed performance data for all of your e-business transactions. You can use this software to perform the following e-business management tasks:

  • Monitor every step of an actual customer transaction as it passes through the complex array of hosts, systems, and applications in your environment: Web and proxy servers, Web application servers, middleware, database management systems, and legacy back-office systems and applications.

  • Simulate customer transactions, collecting "what if?" performance data that helps you assess the health of your e-business components and configurations.

  • Consult comprehensive real-time reports that display recently collected data in a variety of formats and from a variety of perspectives.

  • Integrate with the Tivoli Enterprise Date Warehouse, where you can store collected data for use in historical analysis and long-term planning.

  • Receive prompt, automated notification of performance problems. With IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance, you can effectively measure how users experience your Web site and applications under different conditions and at different times. Most important, you can quickly isolate the source of performance problems as they occur, so that you can correct those problems before they produce expensive outages and lost revenue.

2.2.1 TMTP 5.2 components

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance provides the following major components that you can use to investigate and monitor transactions in your environment.

Discovery component

The discovery component enables you to identify incoming Web transactions that need to be monitored.

Two listening components

Listening components collect performance data for actual user transactions that are executed against the Web servers and Web application servers in your environment. For example, you can use a listening component to gauge the time it takes for customers to access an online product catalog and order a specific item. Listening components, also called listeners, are the Quality of Service and J2EE monitoring components.

Two playback components

Playback components robotically execute, or play back, transactions that you record in order to simulate actual user activity. For example, you can record and play back an online ordering transaction to assess the relative performance of different Web servers, or to identify potential bottlenecks before launching a new interactive application. Playback components are Synthetic Transaction Investigator and Rational® Robot/Generic Windows.

Discovery, listening, and playback operations are run according to instructions set forth in policies that you create. A policy defines the area of your Web site to investigate or the transactions to monitor, indicates the types of information to collect, specifies a schedule, and provides a range of other parameters that determine how and when the policy is run.

The following subsections describe the discovery, listening, and playback components.

The discovery component

When you use the discovery process, you create a discovery policy in which you define an area of your Web environment that you want to investigate. The discovery policy then samples transaction activity and produces a list of all URI requests, with average performance times, that have occurred during a discovery period. You can consult the list of discovered URIs to identify transactions to monitor with listening policies.

A discovery policy is associated with one of the two listening components. A Quality of Service discovery policy discovers transactions that run through the Web servers in your environment. A J2EE discovery policy discovers transactions that run on J2EE application servers. Figure 2-2 on page 42 shows an example of a discovered application topology.

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Figure 2-2: Application topology discovered by TMTP

Listening: The Quality of Service component

The Quality of Service component samples incoming HTTP transactions against a Web server and measures various time intervals involved in completing each transaction. An HTTP transaction consists of a single HTTP request and response.

A sample of transactions might consist of every tenth transaction from a specific collection of users over a peak time period. The Quality of Service component can measure the following time intervals for each transaction:

  • Back-end service time. This is the time it takes a Web server to receive the request, process it, and respond to it.

  • Page render time. This is the time it takes to process and display a Web page on a browser.

  • Round-trip time (also called user experience time). This is the time it takes to complete the entire page request, from the moment the user initiates the request (by clicking on a link, for example) until the request is fulfilled. Round-trip time includes back-end service time, page render time, and network and data transfer time.

Listening: The J2EE monitoring component

The J2EE monitoring component collects performance data for transactions that run on a J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) application server. Six J2EE subtransaction types can be monitored: servlets, session beans, entity beans, JMS, JDBC, and RMI. The J2EE monitoring component supports the following two application servers:

  • IBM WebSphere Application Server 4.0.3 and up

  • BEA WebLogic 7.0.1

You can dynamically install and remove ARM instrumentation for either type of application server. You can also enable and disable the instrumentation.

Playback: Synthetic Transaction Investigator

The Synthetic Transaction Investigator (STI) component measures how users might experience a Web site in the course of performing a specific transaction, such as searching for information, enrolling in a class, or viewing an account. Using STI involves the following two activities:

  • Recording a transaction. You use STI Recorder to record your actions as you perform the sequence of steps that make up the transaction. For example, you might perform the following steps to view an account: log on, click to display the main menu, click to view an account summary and log off. The mechanism for recording is to save all HTTP request information in an XML document.

  • Playing back the transaction. STI plays back the recorded transaction according to parameters you specify. You can schedule a playback to repeat at different times and from different locations in order to evaluate performance and availability under varying conditions. During playback, STI can measure response times, check for missing or damaged links, and scan for specified content.

Playback: Rational Robot/Generic Windows

Together, Rational Robot and Generic Windows enable you to gauge how users might experience a Microsoft Windows application that is used in your environment. Like STI, Rational Robot and Generic Windows involve record and playback activities:

  • Recording a transaction. You use Rational Robot to record the application actions that you want to investigate. For example, you might record the actions involved in accessing a proprietary document sharing application deployed on an application server. The steps might include logging on and obtaining the main page display.

  • Playing back the transaction. The Generic Windows component plays back the recorded transaction and measures response times.



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End-to-End E-business Transaction Management Made Easy
End-To-End E-Business Transaction Management Made Easy
ISBN: 0738499323
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 105
Authors: IBM Redbooks

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