I’ve seen on a number of occasions where alerts are placed on a dashboard, assigned a trouble ticket, and/or emailed to all members within the IT operations department. Inevitably, and predictably, chaos reigns. The easy alerts are quickly dealt with, and the more difficult situations are never given more than a cursory look. It’s generally true that if the Operations team can’t identify the problem in less than 30 minutes, it won’t get fixed.
With Business Transaction Monitoring (BTM), it is important to ensure that your IT Operations team understand how to prioritize and respond to an alert. And unlike traditional monitoring systems, many of these alerts will require escalation. Unlike the maturity of IT infrastructure management, there are often no failsafe mechanisms or reset buttons available to fix transaction issues. BTM alerts may concern an individual transaction, but may equally highlight a slowdown along the transaction path and thereby affecting large volumes of transactions.
As BTM matures within an IT Operations department, reactions become smoother and shorter, increasing the overall Service Delivery Performance and Customer Experience. Underpinning this evolution – and making it less painful for all concerned – lies an understanding and acceptence that most IT organizations are really only starting out and learning about transaction paths, transaction bottlenecks, the interdependence of software services, and the close collaboration required between Business and IT to set clear goals and expectations.