Business transaction management (BTM), also known as business transaction monitoring, application transaction profiling or user defined transaction profiling, is the practice of managing information technology (IT) from a business transaction perspective. It provides a tool for tracking the flow of transactions across IT infrastructure, in addition to detection, alerting, and correction of unexpected changes in business or technical conditions. BTM provides visibility into the flow of transactions across infrastructure tiers, including a dynamic mapping of the application topology.
Using BTM, application support teams are able to search for transactions based on message context and content – for instance, time of arrival or message type – providing a way to isolate causes for common issues such as application exceptions, stalled transactions, and lower-level issues such as incorrect data values.The ultimate goal of BTM is to improve service quality for users conducting business transactions while improving the effectiveness of the IT applications and infrastructure across which those transactions execute. The main benefit of BTM is its capacity to identify precisely where transactions are delayed within the IT infrastructure. BTM also aims to provide proactive problem prevention and the generation of business service intelligence for optimization of resource provisioning and virtualization.A number of factors have led to the demand for the development of BTM software:

Modern applications have become more complex, modular, distributed, interdependent and sensitive to environmental conditions.
IT infrastructure has become a complex multi-tier (see multitier architecture) environment.
The rise of service-oriented architecture in systems development.
The proliferation of service level agreements.