BTM Tags and Agents

With the BTM Tags/Agents bar chart (ANALYZE > Graphs > Combined Bar Charts > BTM Tags/Agents) you can compare transactions and groups of computers with respect to availability, response times and number of requests for transactions reported by the PerformanceGuard BTM feature. By selecting multiple tags and computer groups you can compare combinations of these tags and groups.

BTM, Business Transaction Monitoring, is a feature for monitoring complex activity that involve multiple steps and/or multiple servers. It essentially works as a stop watch that lets you record the time it takes to execute a complex activity. BTM is very flexible: PerformanceGuard simply provides a set of building blocks that your organization can use to integrate with other applications and define relevant transactions.

A transaction is some sort of complex activity that your organization wants to measure, for example how long time it takes to connect to a price database and update product prices. Due to the flexibility of BTM many types of activity can be measured as a transaction, depending on what's relevant in your organization. If the names of transactions and transaction groups in your organization are not immediately meaningful to you, ask your PerformanceGuard administrator for advice.

• Transaction group: Transactions may grouped, for example into finance transactions, human resources transactions, etc. If that's the case in your organization, select which group of transactions you want to base the graph on.
• Transaction: Select which transaction you want to base the graph on. If you selected a transaction group in the previous field, you can only select transactions from that group.

• Tags: Select which transaction tag (if any available) you want to view on the graph. You can select multiple tags by pressing the CTRL key while you select tags.

   What's a tag?

  transaction tag is used to identify a variant of a transaction. For example, if you have a transaction called Print, you could have a Color tag for color prints and a Grayscale tag for non-color prints. Tags are not always used, so don't worry if you are not able to select any.
• Type: Determines which type of value the graph will contain, for example response times in seconds.
• Agents: Select which computer groups the bar chart should be based on. You can select multiple groups by pressing the CTRL key while selecting groups.
• X-axis Min and Max: Enter the required range for the bar chart's horizontal axis. If you leave the fields empty, the range will automatically reflect the minimum and maximum values found in the data.

• Interval: Select the period of time that the graph should cover. If the predefined intervals don't suit you, select Custom to specify your own interval.