Threshold management for problem determination in transaction based e-commerce systems

Managing the service level objectives (SLO) in environments that implement e-commerce systems is a challenging task. It typically involves a clear understanding of how user transactions are supported by the I/T resources that comprise the e-commerce system. This paper investigates a subset of this important management problem. Using transaction to resource dependencies, the authors show how one can experimentally calculate the extent to which supporting resources for a transaction contribute to the end-to-end SLOs for that transaction. An important aspect of this process is the classification of user transactions, based on the profile of their resource usage, enabling one to set appropriate thresholds for different classes. This approach is then used to aid the detection and remediation of application performance bottlenecks.