The new product family initially consists of two tools that were released late last year but not officially announced until now. One of those offerings, BMC's Transaction Management Application Response Time (TMART) software, measures the performance of applications from the perspective of end users, said the vendor. The other, the Mainview Transaction Analyzer, tracks transactions on IBM mainframes running the z/OS operating system.

TMART began shipping at the end of November and starts at $60,000. The Mainview analyzer became generally available in late December and starts at US$75,000. Houston-based BMC plans to add two more tools to the new product line later this year, said Alisa Nessler, vice president of the vendor's transaction management program.

The group of tools is focused on giving business and IT managers real-time views of application performance at the transaction level across an entire company, Nessler said.

Many IT managers have told BMC that detecting, isolating and fixing problematic transactions takes too long and costs too much, she added. IT managers "are drowning in data and struggling for searchable information," Nessler said. "Unfortunately, the IT department is the last to know about system problems."

Gary Lu, vice president and senior architect at Citigroup Inc. in New York, said he is evaluating TMART. Lu, who previously has deployed a range of BMC's database backup and monitoring tools, said the transaction management software provides "end-to-end visibility of a business process, which we are not be able to do today."