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Business Transactions and Transaction Frames

Business transactions and transaction frames are key concepts in CA Continuous Application Insight. These terms are also referred to in the documentation as transactions, paths, and frames.

A business transaction is a representation of how a user request is serviced by an application. Each transaction encompasses a code path in which one or more servers are run as the result of a client request.

A transaction frame encapsulates data about a method call that the DevTest Java Agent or a CAI Agent Light intercepted. The data includes such information as:

• The name of the method
• The name of the class to which the method belongs
• The arguments that were passed to the method
• The value that the method returned
• Log4j messages that are written
• Exceptions that are thrown by the Java classes

Each transaction frame has a unique identifier and a category. Typically, the category represents a protocol or operating environment. Examples include EJB, JDBC, JMS, REST, SOAP, and WebSphere MQ. A transaction frame is a node in the transaction path. Each node represents a step in the overall business transaction and the code or business logic that executed. A collection of transaction frames shows the order of the code that executed to fulfill the business transactions.

Each transaction contains a hierarchical set of transaction frames. The root transaction frame is the top-level frame in the hierarchy. Each transaction has a unique identifier.

Transactions are also referred to as paths. A transaction path is a visual representation that shows the flow of how the user request is serviced. For example, the path reveals all the front-end and back-end services that a transaction contacts and the relationship between the services.

The following graphic displays a transaction path in the DevTest Portal.