End-To-End E-Business Transaction Management Made Easy

7.2 Reporting differences from Version 5.1

There are a number of reporting differences between Version 5.2 and Version 5.1 of IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance Web Transaction Performance. Most of the changes are good; however, a couple introduce differences that need to be understood by users familiar with previous versions.

Among the better changes are:

• Version 5.2 now makes the Big Board the focus of reporting. When problems arise, TMTP Version 5.2 users are expected to access the Big Board first, as it enables them to quickly focus on the potential problem cause.

• The other reports are for either daily reporting or to gain extra context into problems:

  • What is the behavior of this policy over time?

  • What were my slowest policies last week?

  • What is the availability of this policy in the last 24 hours?

• The Topology Report is a completely new way of visualizing the transaction. The customer can now visually see the performance of a transaction for both specific transaction instances as well as an hourly, aggregate view.

• In addition to performance and response code (availability) thresholds, the topology has "interpreted" status icons for subtransactions that might be behaving poorly. This is especially true when looking at instance topology, where the user can compare subtransaction times to the average for the hour to help determine under-performing transactions.

Other changes which users experienced with previous versions need to be aware of are:

• The STI graph (bar chart) is now based off of hourly data instead of instance data. For a policy running every 15 minutes, that means only one bar per hour. Drilling down into the STI data for the hour's topology shows a drop-down list of each instance.

• QoS graphs are hourly now instead of the former one minute aggregates.

• While not a reporting limitation, data is only rolled up to the server every hour causing the graphs to not update as quickly as before. However, a user can force an update by selecting the Retrieve Latest Data. The behavior of this function is explained in further detail in the following sections.

• Page Analyzer Viewer is no longer linked from the STI event view. Page Analyzer Viewer data is only accessible through the Page Analyzer Viewer report, where you choose an STI policy, Management Agent, and time.

• There is no equivalent to the QoS report with all the hits to the QoS system in one minute. However, if the collection of instance data is turned on, which is not the default, all QoS data may be viewed through the instance topologies.