IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance Version 5.3, in addition to a deeper view into the performance of WebSphere application transactions, adds the ability to track transaction performance across BEA WebLogic Web application servers; IBM's CICS, IMS and DB2 databases; Siebel 7.7 applications; and SAP back-end services, according to Chris O'Connor, vice president of availability and business service management at IBM, in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

"This brings in a whole new set of topologies and data points—Web servers, Web application environments, different databases and transaction processes—and there's integration with Siebel around their application response measurement instrumentation," said O'Connor.

The latest release of the transaction monitoring program also allows users set up policies that group a set of transactions together. "You can set up different conditions and how you alarm and alert," said O'Connor.

That capability is intended for larger environments in which hundreds of transactions are being monitored.

The tool, which competes with Mecury Interactive's Mercury Application Management Fondation and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView Transaction Analyzer, can automatically discover what systems key business transactions use and record response times at each step. It is intended to help users analyze performance bottlenecks across all the components that make up a distributed system.

The latest release is available Friday. The software starts at $6,200 and pricing is based on the number of systems monitored.

IBM in several weeks will also detail its efforts to instrument software IBM acquired with Rational Software.

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