The BTM workflow

This section describes the BTM workflow that enables you to create, deploy, and use a transaction pathway to monitor your technologies.

A transaction pathway has a life cycle. The transaction pathway's lifetime corresponds to the business process it monitors. If the IT infrastructure or technologies change, so must the transaction pathway.

While this workflow, described in the steps below, appears linear, there are many occasions when you need to go back to an earlier step and proceed in an iterative process.

If you are unfamiliar with the product, see Working in the BTM tab.

1. Locate or create a business process document on which to base your transaction pathway model.
   
   The business process can be explicitly known and might be available in the enterprise as, in its simplest form, a Visio diagram, or in more complex situations where there is a business process modeling and execution technology in use, such as IBM WebSphere Business Integration or Microsoft BizTalk Server. Many business processes are not controlled through any direct state engine and are simply implicitly understood. If that is the case, you need to know the business logic that defines the business process.
2. Gather information about the technologies that implement the business process for the transactions to be monitored. Refer to Supported application transaction tracing technologies for transaction monitoring.
3. Install the TMTM Extensible Agent and Extensions on identified hosts and technologies (see Installing). Installation prior to configuration of your transaction pathways is important as information can be gathered by those extensions to assist in configuring the transaction pathway.
4. Install and configure the TMTM Configuration Agent (see Installing the Agent and monitoring extensions).
5. Create one or more profiles: Based on the information collected in steps 1 and 2, define users and groups and assign BTM rights and associate technology hosts with the profile. See Working with profiles for more details.
6. Create a transaction pathway model: Based on the information collected in steps 1 and 2, create a graphical representation of touch points in the IT infrastructure. The created transaction pathway model is referred to as the base transaction pathway. In addition you need to:
   1. Validate the base transaction pathway model. Clear any invalid messages by altering the transaction pathway.
   2. Generate the base transaction pathway. This creates the generated transaction pathway model instance which is a snapshot of the configuration that can be deployed for monitoring. You can continue to edit the base transaction pathway and regenerate as needed.
      
      See Creating and deploying a transaction pathway model for more details.
7. Deploy the generated instance to the technology hosts represented in the transaction pathway. The TMTM Extensible Agent and BTM Extensions start monitoring your technology. See Deploying BTM configurations for more details.
8. Use summary metrics, SLA metrics, events, history, and dashboards to check the operation of the transaction pathway.

9. Experiment with changes to the generated instance. Some changes might be made to the generated instance which do not require a deployment. Generated instances are not available for promotion to another profile or export. However, you can promote the changes back to the base transaction pathway (see Working with profiles).
   
   

   Best practice

   Changes to the generated instance can be imported into the base transaction pathway. Changes to the generated instance should be kept to a minimum. Major changes should be made only to the base transaction pathway (step 6) and another instance generated.

10. When required, promote your base transaction pathway to another environment. For example, you might do this to change the hosts used in a quality assurance environment to the hosts used in a production environment. If both environments are monitored by the same installation of the product you can use the Promote to Profile option. Otherwise, you can export the profile and import. Use the translation file to change one environments configuration to the other. See Working with profiles for more details.