The launch is part of a six-month plan by BMC to produce service management software that will show administrators end-to-end views of transactions, and identify where a specific problem lies that could lead to a degradation or failure in a business service. These views can be drilled into to reveal the detailed state of transactions down at the component level, and from there it will increasingly become possible to automatically launch problem-resolution processes as BMC adds more features to the product set.
First up, and launched today, is a Transaction Analyzer that has been built on the popular MainView mainframe systems software and is designed to deliver mainframe diagnostics for root cause analysis. It tracks transactions across z/OS-based operating systems platforms, correlating real transaction information from different subsystems with the path taken in the logical order by unit of work. It supports CICS, IMS, and DB2.
Joining it is a new BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time system, which replaces the existing Patrol End to End software application. It uses synthetic transactions to measure transaction response time and end-to-end user experience. In doing so, it can capture session details for diagnosis of failed transactions.
Think of it as a system for transaction triage, said Peter Armstrong, BMC’s corporate strategist, adding that the products planned for this series will help administrators identify, isolate, and then prioritize fixes with an overall aim to quicken the time to resolution for cross-domain end-to-end transactions. The task is to find a problem fast, and then to be able to drill down into that problem to identify it as one associated with a storage component in an HTTP server, say, and then to prioritize a fix accordingly, he said.
Importantly, the new products are designed to integrate with other BMC service level and systems management products. The software is part of a much bigger picture we are putting together, said Armstrong. The system talks with the service model that sits above Atrium, the BMC configuration management database, and takes data feeds in both directions. If necessary, BMC’s systems will autogenerate a helpdesk ticket if something is going wrong, and can be hooked into existing capacity planning and provisioning systems to kick-start other systems management processes.
The company claims its new product set will be the only transaction-management solution currently on the market that integrates and correlates transactional data, end-user experience, and infrastructure monitoring. Eventually it will provide insight into the end-user experience, and views of the path a transaction takes across mainframe, distributed and n-tier architectures for synthetic and real transactions.
We’ve started off with the mainframe product launch, but will extend transaction management into distributed systems infrastructures so that we can build a unified view across the entire transaction topology, whatever that might be, Armstrong said.
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