AmberPoint Introduces Business Transaction Safety Net

Business transaction manager traces, tracks transaction failures

• By James E. Powell
• 04/06/2009

AmberPoint today released an enhanced version of its monitoring and managing solution that tracks business transactions through interconnected enterprise applications. Business Transaction Management (BTM) is introducing its new feature set under the name Business Transaction Safety Net; this includes Active Transaction Recording, Transaction Search Engine, and the ability to extend BTM to custom applications.

According to the company, "AmberPoint traces each transaction end-to-end across complex application streams such as claims processing, user provisioning, or procurement systems, discovering any transaction failures and quickly isolating the root cause."

The need to trace such transactions is becoming increasing complex, Ed Horst, chief marketing officer of AmberPoint told <em>Enterprise Strategies</em>. Horst says the tracking can work within an organization's applications and can track transactions as they interact with partners or third-party providers.

AmberPoint uses a non-invasive “message fingerprinting” technique that can follow transactions as they move through composite applications and can do so in real time. This helps organizations monitor performance against service-level agreements, alert the appropriate party in real time whenever a "lost, failed, non-compliant, or fraudulent transaction" is discovered. If an application component can process a message, AmberPoint can track it.

Business Transaction Safety Net

The new features "significantly reduce the risk and cost of transaction failures across distributed applications," according to a company release. An enterprise is able to minimize business costs of lost or failed transactions when they discover such issues in real time, which also lowers the mean time to repair. Root-cause analysis is also easier because the program points out where the transaction failure(s) occurred.

In addition, new search capabilities relieve IT from having to search IT logs natively; AmberPoint’s Transaction Search Engine provides a single transaction searching console that locates specific transactions based on the technical or business data it has logged, such as error codes or customer numbers. Once found, users can drill down to see related transactions.

AmberPoint looks into the content of messages flowing through an enterprise and logs data critical to operations; it can record order numbers, order amounts, customer identifiers, and the like. Using a policy-based system, the software logs transaction data by context and content and can "sanitize" the data -- that is, remove sensitive or confidential data to address privacy and compliance concerns.

AmberPoint is also including its Transaction Visibility Toolkit, a platform-neutral protocol and SDK "that enables organizations to augment the transaction data AmberPoint collects by extending the reach of AmberPoint’s BTM to one-off applications and infrastructure," so you can use BTM capabilities with in-house-written applications, vertical solutions, and legacy applications.

AmberPoint includes support for many new platforms, including Apache ServiceMix, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Oracle WebLogic Server 10, SAP NetWeaver clusters, and TIBCO BusinessWorks.

More information is available at http://www.amberpoint.com.