IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Transactions, Version 7.4.0.0

About Response Time

The Response Time component of ITCAM for Transactions provides a targeted solution for managing composite applications. It is designed to provide support staff with the information they need to assess whether composite applications are working correctly everywhere in the network. This functionality plays a dual role in enterprise IT. If a composite application is used within your own enterprise environment, you might be able to tolerate a slight drop in performance that has little or no effect on your financial results. If, however, a composite application is used by external customers, a drop in performance might have legal consequences due to violations of preestablished Service Level Agreements (SLAs). While neither of these scenarios is desirable, both are addressed, and in many cases precluded, by the monitoring capabilities provided with Response Time agents. The software offers the following features:
  • A single infrastructure built on IBM Tivoli Monitoring.
  • A consolidated user interface built on Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP), which offers single sign-on and common reporting.
  • The ability to fully customize the reports and workspaces.
  • Intelligent alerts based on IBM Tivoli Monitoring situations.
  • Reports and alerts for real-time or historical metrics.
  • Identifies bottlenecks in the Client, Network, or Server (CNS) by breaking down response time data into segments so that you can understand trends and system loads.
  • Identifies, reports, and sends alerts on individual clients or locations.
  • Discovers, reports on, and sends alerts for backend server resources.
  • Provides the capability for configuring data aggregation as frequently as every 5 minutes.
  • Provides simplified configuration, including default situations.
Response Time includes the following monitoring agents:
  • Application Management Console
  • Robotic Response Time
  • Web Response Time

Application Management Console

Application Management Console provides an accurate snapshot of ITCAM for Transactions monitoring in near real time. It provides real-time aggregated and consolidated application and transaction availability and response time information for all applications monitored by Internet Services, Response Time, and Transaction Tracking monitoring agents. It collects data in real time at a configurable, constant interval instead of relying on the Tivoli Data Warehouse.

Use the Application Management Console to see status summary and trend analysis information across managed resources and to perform problem determination. This information is displayed in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal.

The Application Management Console agent is required when other ITCAM for Transactions agents are installed. The Application Management Console agent manages and distributes profiles, maintenance windows, client information, and user information for all the other Response Time and Transaction Tracking monitoring agents.

Robotic Response Time

Robotic Response Time provides active monitoring of customer business transactions. These business transactions represent a complex set of steps typically performed by an end user to complete a business objective, such as logging in to an online banking application, checking an account balance, and transferring funds. This set of steps can be recorded and played back by using this agent to verify availability and performance. It is installed separately on various desktop and server systems in your enterprise and on the internet.

Monitoring can be completed from the start of a transaction and, because it is enabled to support TTAPI and can be integrated into the Transaction Collector and Transaction Reporter functions, you can display end-to-end topology views of your robotic transactions as they flow through the system.

Robotic Response Time provides the following features:

  • Improved robotic monitoring with Rational Performance Tester.
  • Playback of scripts by using Rational Functional Tester against Windows applications, including 3270 applications.
  • Immediate playback of robotic scripts.
  • Monitoring causes of script failure by viewing actual screen captures and HTML data captures from failed playback sessions in Rational Performance Tester and Rational Functional Tester.
  • Monitoring the performance and availability of applications to detect problems before end-users experience them. It performs this monitoring by using robotic technology to record and play back transactions that determine if the transaction is performing as expected.
Robotic Response Time provides robotic monitoring for the following applications:
  • Web applications that use HTTP and HTTPS protocols
  • Microsoft Windows GUI client applications
  • Applications or scripts with a command-line interface, such as:
    • Custom monitoring scripts
    • Applications such as DB2® that provide a command-line interface
    • Playback technologies such as Rational Functional Tester or wget
  • Mercury LoadRunner HTTP and HTTPS scripts
  • Citrix hosted applications
  • SAP
  • Siebel
  • Web Services
  • Oracle ERP Applications
  • Robotic scripts file transfer - discovers and uploads all of the files and file dependencies that are required for robotic scripts. You can also instruct the tool to automatically ARM-instrument a recording that has not previously been instrumented. Robotic scripts record a sequence of steps in a transaction to simulate a particular business transaction executed from specific locations so you can monitor end-user experience with Robotic Response Time

See the Administrators Guide for more information about using Rational Performance Tester and Rational Functional Tester with Robotic Response Time.

Web Response Time

Web Response Time provides real end-user monitoring of client web requests to server components. It can be installed locally on the server system, or on a separate system. Web Response Time uses server-side monitoring to capture HTTP and HTTPS transaction data such as response time and status codes. You can use it to capture the performance and availability data of actual users for Service Level Agreement (SLA) reporting. Web Response Time also detects protocols and applications by monitoring TCP/IP network flows.

Using Web Response Time, you can perform the following tasks:

  • Monitor end-user performance and availability for web-based applications.
  • Capture web request response time and its segmentation.
  • Monitor the performance of web page request and each embedded object in that web page. This feature, which can be switched on or off, can identify if any graphics, tables, JavaScript, or Applets are causing response time problems. Audio or video request monitoring is not available.
  • Capture and report on HTTP query string and FORM Post data.
  • Monitor response times, including response time of the workstation, without being physically located on the workstation.
  • Monitor HTTP and HTTPS transactions while running in Appliance Mode.

    If you prefer to not modify your web server, you can install the Web Response Time agent in appliance mode, either locally on the server, or remotely on a different host that utilizes a network tap, port spanning, or a hub to gain access to the network traffic of the server. With this configuration, you can monitor your web servers without modifying or impacting the server systems. This method is the preferred method of installation.

  • Monitor specific users by their sessions and user names.
  • By default, the Web Response Time agent monitors all network interfaces. However, it can also monitor a specific network interface. By default, the Web Response Time Analyzer automatically selects the correct interface. However, you can limit it to one network interface.
  • Monitor transactions from web servers to WebSphere Application Server by using the Web Response Time - Transaction Tracking integration option.
The Web Response Time agent can track transactions without the need for domain-specific or application-specific data collectors. This type of monitoring is called agentless transaction tracking, and extends the capabilities of existing ITCAM for Transactions features and functions:
  • Monitors generic TCP/IP based network flows.
  • Enhanced Tivoli Enterprise Portal workspaces provide additional capabilities to visualize network flow data and dependencies.
  • The Transaction Reporter agent uses data from the Web Response Time agent along with data from existing domain-based data collectors, such as Data Collector for WebSphere Message Broker, to display this TCP/IP data in topology views. These topology views can include data from both traditional agent-based data sources and agentless tracking data sources. Using these capabilities together, you can deploy Web Response Time agents to collect data, then display the resulting topology, and successively deploy agent-based data collectors to obtain more detailed tracking information.
  • You can use additional capabilities in the Application Management Configuration Editor to create and modify configurations that the Web Response Time agent applies to the monitored TCP/IP network flow data.

Web Response Time is also an Aggregation agent.

Aggregation agents are monitoring agents that provide data storage and compute aggregates for Transaction Tracking. Aggregation agents include Transaction Collectors and Web Response Time agents.

Aggregation agents, including Transaction Collectors and Web Response Time, communicate with the Transaction Reporter through the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server. Multiple Aggregation agents can report to a single Transaction Reporter. Each Aggregation agent can be queried by one or more Transaction Reporters. Transaction Collectors do not communicate with each other.

Parent topic: Overview


Last updated: September 2014