Optimizing cloud-based it-systems towards business objectives: automatic topology-based analysis to determine impact of it-systems on business metrics

Abstract

A system and method is proposed for estimating the contribution of components of a distributed computing environment to the generation of economically relevant values, like e.g., revenue numbers. Agents are deployed to the computing environment that trace executed transactions and that monitor components used to execute those transactions. The transaction trace data also contains data about the origin/user of transactions, which may be used to group transactions corresponding to particular interactions of individual users with the monitored application into visit data. Data describing economically relevant activities of transactions, like the purchase of goods, are also observed by agents and reported in trace data. Functional dependencies described in transaction trace data and resource related dependencies derived from component monitoring data are used to identify functionality and components that contributed to the generation of business value. The generated business value is assigned to contributing components to incrementally create data describing the economic value of those components. The so generated data can be used for various business-related analyses.