Context

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You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Service Level Management
  •   Monitor and Report Service Level Achievements

Details

Understanding the end-user experience enables you to measure and monitor the level of service that you are delivering to your customers. Ultimately, it's end users that fund IT departments, and so it's critical to ensure the delivery of satisfactory service to those end users. With transaction-based management in IBM® Tivoli® Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking, you can measure and report the level of service delivered to the end user, and provide data to IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor, so that it can be used to track the compliance with service level agreements between IT and the business. These reports provide a definitive basis for discussion with the lines of business on the value, performance and cost of IT service that is being delivered.

IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking uses two basic methods to capture the end-user view of transactions:

1. Active monitoring, in which pre-recorded user transactions are played back by a robot PC, to measure the availability and performance of the business transactions at a typical end user (Playback policies).
2. Passive monitoring, where the performance of actual end-user transactions is measured (Discovery and Listening policies).

It's very important to combine both the active and passive monitoring techniques, in order to get a full picture of the level of service being delivered. Active monitoring is the only way to truly measure the availability of the business transaction at the end user: does the transaction work or not?

IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking allows you to configure thresholds on your monitoring policies and provides different reports and event notifications on violation conditions. Event responses such as e-mail notification and script execution enable not only the communication of the information but also allow you to take automated actions in the case of an incident or a failure. You can also choose to create an event in the Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC).

We'll now take a look at each of these capabilities. First, the active monitoring techniques that can monitor the availability and performance delivered to the end user:

• The Generic Windows GUI component allows you to monitor the playback of Microsoft® Windows® applications, applets, and JavaScript®. Additionally, Generic Windows VU allows you to monitor at the protocol level. Generic Windows components record typical end-user experience and detect problems in a proactive manner.
• Synthetic Transaction Investigator (STI) runs typical end-user web transactions on e-business machines to record the service level that is delivered in terms of response time for both the overall business process, and each step of the end user's business process. STI can monitor HTTP response codes and search string content thereby monitoring availability of your transactions. The Page Analyzer Viewer report shows a breakdown of the response times of the different elements in the Web pages of your Web application.

The passive monitoring technologies monitor the response time for real transactions, using a variety of implementation points:

• The Client Application Tracker (CAT) measures and monitors the response times experienced by real end users, on their client desktops.
• The Quality of Service monitoring component measures total round-trip time, back-end processing time, and client-browser render time. It also supports statistical sampling on specific customer transactions. Features include filtering based on URIs and on IP addresses. The Quality of Service component can also generate alerts when thresholds are violated.
• The Generic ARM component allows you to monitor transactions through applications that have been instrumented using either ARM 2.0 or ARM 4.0 API, for example, Siebel server Version 7.7 and later. If you use the Open Group standard ARM API to add instrumentation calls to your own transactions, you can also use IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking to monitor them.

To set up and configure monitoring, you install a Management Agent on the machines that you want to monitor your applications on. Then, you deploy the monitoring component - Generic Windows, Synthetic Transaction Investigator, Quality of Service or Generic ARM - that caters to your monitoring requirement. Finally, you set up monitoring policies with thresholds and event responses to monitor the service.

As an example, consider the shopping cart application of an online store. You want to monitor the operation to ensure service delivery. The IT infrastructure consists of a browser-based Web client, and a WebSphere® Application Server. Before you begin to configure monitoring, install a Management Agent. Also install the STI recorder and monitoring component on a desktop client machine.

1. Record the transactions using the STI Recorder, and upload the recording to the Management Server.
2. Create a playback policy for the transaction.
3. Configure STI settings (thresholds - performance, HTTP response code, string content) To associate the thresholds with event actions, create the event responses first.
4. Optionally configure QoS settings (thresholds).
5. Choose a Schedule and Agent Group.
6. Create a Policy Group, one that maps to your logical IT structure.
7. Assign Name/Description -> Click Finish.

After the policy is distributed to the agents, the transaction is played back at the associated schedule, and monitoring information is collected as the transaction passes through the application server. You can configure thresholds after you monitor your transactions to get an idea of the normal response times to determine violation levels.

For more details on how to configure monitoring using IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking, refer to the Administrator's Guide.

IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking provides the following key reports that help you monitor and understand service levels.

• Availability line graph shows the health of a monitored transaction over time.
• Overall Transaction Over Time line graph shows aggregate response times (performance) for a monitored transaction over a specified time period.
• STI bar chart is used to investigate the performance and availability of a transaction and its sub-transactions played back over a specified period of time.
• Page Analyzer Viewer Report displays details about timing, size, identity, and source of all elements on Web pages.
• Transaction with Sub-transactions graph shows the performance of a monitored business process, and of up to five of its sub-transactions with the highest response times over a specified period of time.
• Slowest Transaction table lists transactions whose aggregate response times have been the slowest over a specified time period.

Additionally, the data can be forwarded to IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor, so that it can be used to track the compliance with service level agreements between IT and the business.

For detailed information on the reporting features of IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking, please refer to the Operators Guide.

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