IBM Improves Transaction Monitoring in Tivoli

Thanks to major advancements in its autonomic computing technology, IBM has updated its Tivoli management software, offering customers a map that identifies failures in Web transactions.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance 5.3 allows organizations to see business transactions as they flow through an IT environment, as well as discover what systems the transactions use. The software then provides response times for each step.

As distributed computing environments become more complex, the importance of seeing transactions is compounded by the sheer number of them, particularly in financial services scenarios.

IBM's goal is to help customers detect performance bottlenecks across the entire system, which is an important function of the company's autonomic, or self-healing, computing strategy.

Rooted in a project called Eliza, autonomic computing is considered to be a keystone technology in Big Blue's on-demand strategy for letting computing systems manage themselves quickly, on the fly, and with as little human intervention as possible.

Because this frees up administrators to focus on other tasks, IBM sells on-demand computing as an architecture that saves enterprises time and money. Other vendors, such as Microsoft , Sun Microsystems and HP have acquired or developed technologies that perform similar automation functions.

IBM is receiving support for the product from partner Siebel, which has integrated Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance into Siebel Server 7.7.

IBM and Siebel co-created Siebel's Application Response Measurement, a standard that profiles the time spent by each user request in the different layers of the Siebel Smart Web Architecture, to work with the new Tivoli tool.

This will help customers better monitor and diagnose problems in their Siebel applications, said Skip Bacon, vice president of technology at Siebel, in a statement.

Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance 5.3 has been expanded to view Web services , Web servers, IBM CICS, IBM IMS, IBM DB2 and SAP back-end services, as well as network delays between ARM-instrumented nodes. The new software also lets users group single transactions into a set of policy groups to boost usability in large computing systems.