International Business Machines Corporation

W Nathaniel Mills, Iii

Joseph L Hellerstein

Alexander M Keller

Mark Steven Squillante

John Frederick Morar

Gautam Kar

LeRoy Albert Krueger, Jr

Nagui Halim

John Joseph Turek

Srirama Mandyam Krishnakumar

Mark M Maccabee

Willy W Chiu

Electronic contracts or 'eContracts' for representing service level agreements are provided. In one illustrative embodiment, the eContract may comprise information pertaining to: (a) descriptions of business transactions in IT terms; (b) financial implications of business transaction service levels; and (c) reporting to be done in business terms. Of course, the eContract may comprise other terms and conditions. In an illustrative aspect of the invention, a system for managing IT resources in terms of business financials comprises an electronic contract authoring system or 'ecAuthoring system,' an electronic contract manager module or &#x201c;ecManager,&#x201d; and one or more electronic contract agent modules or &#x201c;ecAgents&#x201d; that may run on IT elements (e.g., components of the network) that are being managed. Analysts interact with the ecAuthoring system to construct eContracts. An eContract is input to an ecManager that interprets the contract to report on and optimize IT resources based on business financials. The ecManager collaborates with ecAgents to monitor, report, and enforce contracts expressed in such business terms.

Automated service level management in financial terms

Techniques for use in accordance with application performance decomposition are provided which take advantage of the communications protocol used to carry a transaction between application components in a distributed computing network. Specifically, the invention extends the communications protocol by embedding data, such as timestamp and duration measurement data, in the protocol itself, rather than extending or altering the application or transaction data carried by the protocol as in existing approaches. Thus, the invention provides natural correlation of interactions of distributed application components on such transactions without modification to the application or transaction data. Because the correlation is performed in-line with the application component interactions, minimal data management overhead is required, and correlated performance decomposition is made possible in real-time for the transaction. Furthermore, subsequent processing stages of the distributed application can interpret the communications protocol to glean processing durations of previous stages in order to make decisions regarding treatment of the transaction.

Method and system for embedding correlated performance measurements for distributed application performance decomposition

The present invention comprises a method of relating characteristics gleaned by monitoring application transaction flows (and the decomposition thereof) to produce performance metrics useful to characterize the efficiency and performance of web transactions used in a web-based application. These metrics can assist application designers and developers in reorganizing their application content, programs, and transports to provide improved service to their consumer. Events are generated and composed into predefined activities on a web transaction basis. The performance metric is then derived that entails a relationship between at least two different activities that gives insight into the performance characteristics of the web transaction. By using the derived performance metrics, designers and developers of web pages can judge the effects of changes to their application relative to efficiency and performance. Different applications can also be compared and contrasted using these metrics. Furthermore, these metrics may serve as inputs to planning models used to project capacity, throughput, response time, and availability of the application.

Method, computer program product, and system for deriving web transaction performance metrics

A method, computer program product and a program storage device embodying software for measuring of the response time of an application (including distributed applications in a client/server or Internet environment) as perceived by an end-user. One aspect deals with the measurement of components of the response time and relating those components to user response time. In addition, the components of one transaction can be matched (or correlated) to each other even though they are measured on different systems. The generation of events and transactions can be controlled, allowing their creation to occur as close to their point of origin as practical. Both aggregate and detail reporting facilities provide overall performance and availability information as well as exceptions and/or detail transactions including the decomposition of overall availability and performance metrics into smaller measurements representing the contribution made by select transaction components. An interactive reporting facility enables the selection of a level of transaction decomposition desired. This enables the identification of the transaction components that are introducing delays or faults. The system is extensible, enabling the addition of components to the system that extend its measurement and reporting capabilities. In particular, a language has been created to facilitate the definition of the end-to-end business application transactions. Also, select APIs as well as application data structures allow the addition of software and/or hardware modules to extend the system. The system can also adapt to the presence or absence of select streams of events without having to change its mode of operation. Measurement sources that generate events can be dynamically activated and deactivated.

Application end-to-end response time measurement and decomposition

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Coventry, CT, United States of America

W Nathaniel Mills, Iii