BMC TrueSight Synthetic Monitor overview
The BMC TrueSight Synthetic Monitor with Borland Silk Performer product monitors the performance and reliability of worldwide applications through synthetic (also called robotic) transactions.
The following topics provide a brief introduction to the product and its components:
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TrueSight Synthetic Monitor business value
You use TrueSight Synthetic Monitor to measure application health and user experience. TrueSight Synthetic Monitor enables you to manage the performance and reliability of your applications by executing complex business transactions and monitoring performance and functional behavior. TrueSight Synthetic Monitor enables your business to proactively check service level agreements (SLAs) and receive notification of a breach before the end user is impacted.
You can monitor the client-side business transactions of enterprise applications that are based on technologies such as:
- Web (HTML)
- Client-server databases
- Java EE applications
- .NET Framework applications
- Web services
- ERP and CRM applications
Migrating from BMC TM ART or from BMC Synthetic Transaction Monitoring?
See Knowledge Base article 000011559 (Support logon ID required) for details about the TrueSight Synthetic Assisted MIGration Offering (AMIGO) program.
Define and schedule synthetic monitoring that is distributed around the globe, and measure site health based on metrics such as availability and performance. You can maintain monitoring on an ongoing basis across all tiers of an application and examine reported data in a single, intuitive interface.
Synthetic monitoring concepts and configuration objects
You use the Borland Silk Performer Synthetic Transaction Monitoring scripting utility to simulate user transactions. Synthetic transaction scripts run on a computer with the BMC Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter (TEA) Agent installed.
To understand the monitoring of synthetic transactions, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
Concept | Description |
|---|---|
Synthetic transaction scripts | A transaction script is a sequence of instructions that simulate user transactions. TrueSight Synthetic Monitor uses prerecorded .ltz scripts to simulate end-user transactions, and BMC provides some basic scripts. You can create realistic and customizable scripts through an external scripting tool and then upload, deploy, and manage the scripts in the TrueSight console. The scripting tool, Borland Silk Performer Synthetic Transaction Monitoring for BMC Software, also serves as an execution module to run scripts on the computer with the BMC Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter (TEA) Agent. Each computer with the TEA Agent requires an execution module to run the scripts. On each TEA Agent computer, you can install the full Silk Performer installation, a smaller execution-module-only installation, or TrueLog Explorer, which supports Silk Performer testing efforts with a framework from which you can customize test scripts and view execution log results. For details about working with synthetic transaction scripts, see Using-scripts-to-simulate-end-user-transactions. |
Location | A location is a logical group of TEA Agents, grouped for load balancing and high availability, and according to the needs of your organization. Each Execution Plan is run on one Agent in a location. If several Execution Plans are run on the same location, the Execution Plans are distributed evenly across the location. Each TEA Agent is assigned to a location during Agent installation. |
Execution Plan | An Execution Plan provides the interface for a script and its execution. Through an Execution Plan, you specify the configuration for the script (including custom attributes), locations on which the script runs, run schedules, and blackout periods. An Execution Plan runs a single script. If the Silk Performer project contains more than one script, only the first script in the project runs. For details about working with Execution Plans, see Viewing-an-application-s-synthetic-settings and Editing-an-application-s-synthetic-settings. |
Execution | An execution is the result of a single instance of a script run according to the parameters set in the associated Execution Plan. Each execution may contain one or more transactions. Executions are simulations of end-user processes, and are used to detect issues that might occur before the real end users encounter them. |
Video
The following video gives a brief demo of the workflow for monitoring synthetic transactions:
Related topics
Setting-up-and-managing-synthetic-transaction-monitoring
Monitoring-synthetic-transactions-to-predict-application-health