If I have all transactions… What else do I need?

by Charlie

A customer said something to me recently that really got me thinking. He said, “With the [OPNET Transaction Trace] Warehouse I have all transactions all the time, so really what else do I need? Log files and faults leave clues about performance problems, but I don’t rely on them much these days because I have access to the actual user transactions.”

This is an interesting point that speaks to the power of AppInternals Xpert’s Transaction Trace Warehouse.  One doesn’t have to worry about setting up triggers or SLAs and
thresholds. Every transaction is captured and searchable, so you don’t need to think about what “subset” you are willing to reduce your visibility to. The actual transactions take most of the guessing game out of troubleshooting, so you’re not limited by your own domain expertise (aka you do not have to know what to look for).

Imagine the use case that every IT person fears. Your CFO calls at the end of the quarter and says, “I am trying to close out the books and our financial application is frozen!” If you do not have an easily searchable warehouse of all your transactions, then you are stuck trying to understand where the bottleneck is, looking across different silo’d tools, and ultimately you end up in a war room where valuable resource time is wasted and your CFO’s frustration only grows by the minute. Even worse, imagine if this was a customer-facing website issue and revenue is impacted while you continue to try and track down root cause, all while remaining exposed.

OPNET’s Transaction Trace Warehouse revolutionizes the art of rapid triage. Now when your CFO (or other VIP) calls, you quickly pull up the warehouse, search for your CFO’s user ID, and very quickly identify the bottleneck in his transaction. You can then take your data to the appropriate subject matter experts. Database admins can look at the precise SQL statement issued by the apps. Web teams can see exactly what URLs are accessed, and by whom. Developers can see class and method names and exceptions.

With actionable info in the hands of the right IT specialists, MTTR is drastically reduced, revenue loss is avoided (if this is customer facing or impacts a critical business process), valuable resource time is preserved, and you are the hero!