METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MAPPING AND IDENTIFYING THE ROOT CAUSES OF PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS IN NETWORK-BASED SERVICES

A method, apparatus and computer-program product for mapping and identifying root causes of performance problems in network based services, wherein the service is composed of applications and transactions, is disclosed. The method comprises the steps of establishing a performance objective value, and a threshold value therefrom, for selected ones of the transactions for each of the applications, wherein the aggregate of the performance objective values insures a known service performance, monitoring a measure of performance for each of the selected transactions, generating an indication for each of the performance measures that exceeds a corresponding threshold value and determining the cause of the degradation by correlating the transactions generating the indication with the elements executing the transaction.