Overview of the transaction pathway process

A transaction pathway is a visual representation or model of your business process mapped to the technologies that implement it using logical representations called activities.

You define those technologies that you wish to monitor by creating activity implementations. The activity implementation defines the hosts where the technology runs and other high level information needed for the BTM extension, that monitors that technology, to work. For each activity in the transaction pathway, you select an activity implementation. Refer to Working with activity implementations for details on how to create and define an activity implementation. Refer to Working with activity properties for selecting the activity implementation for an activity.

A transaction is a single usage of the business process. In many cases, the technologies process message data and that data is moved from technology to technology for processing. In other cases, a technology can be instrumented (application code is modified) to call APIs. For either case, the lines or links used to connect the activities define the expected route a transaction might take through the transaction pathway. This procedure is described in Creating a transaction pathway.

Once activities are linked together and an activity implementation has been chosen for an activity, additional associations to the technology might be needed so that the BTM extensions can distinguish when a transaction begins and ends processing by that technology. Refer to Working with associations for details.

If an input or output associations for an activity is configured, monitoring of a transaction is required. A BTM extension requires a way to identify the transaction at that point in order to distinguish it from other transactions. For message based technologies, message formats are defined which instruct the BTM extensions how to parse out transaction identifiers as well as additional required payload data. When a BTM API is used, the identifiers and payload values are provided to the API by the application. Refer to Defining message formats for details on how to define a message format. Refer to Working with activity properties for details on how you select fields from the message format to use as identifiers and payload data.

If the identification of that message differs from technology to technology there might be ways to correlate the identifiers using aliasing. Aliasing is discussed in Working with activity properties.

You might want to define summary metrics, service level agreements (SLAs), collect history and define events for this transaction pathway. Refer to the above mentioned sections for advanced information as well as Working with model properties.
 When you are ready to deploy the configuration for this transaction pathway for the BTM extensions to implement your monitoring refer to Deploying BTM configurations.

Refer to Working with transaction pathway views for daily usage information.