A web site offers one or more services to its users.  The various services that users can avail via a web site are referred to as transactions. For each web site that has been configured, the eG Enterprise system has the ability to monitor individual transactions that happen via the web site.

This page is obtained by clicking the Configure Tramsactions button in the page depicting the currently configured transactions. This page enables the monitor users to add a new web transaction. Also, the users can delete transactions that correspond to him/her alone. Clicking on the Delete button beside the transaction to be removed, will delete it.

To add a new transaction, the user has to specify the name of the transaction in the Transaction Name text box in the next section at the bottom of the page. Only a maximum of 20 characters are allowed for the name of the transaction. A maximum of 15 transactions can be added for a single web site. Corresponding to every transaction, the user has to specify one or more regular expression patterns. Each pattern refers to a set of pages that constitute the transaction. This has to be specified in the Pages to be Included text box. The administrator is allowed to specify a maximum of 6 pages only, and every such page specification should not exceed 64 characters.

• Users can configure transactions to reflect the key operations performed by users of the web site. For example, the key transactions of a retail web site include: login, registration, browsing of the product catalog, searching the catalog, adding to shopping cart, deleting items from the cart, payment, etc. By monitoring individual transactions, web site operators can determine patterns of user accesses to individual transactions. Moreover, errors and response time issues with individual transactions can be monitored.

• As indicated above, the user has to provide regular expression patterns for each transaction. For example, consider a web site for which login is handled by a Java Server Page called Login.jsp and addition and deletion of products is handled by a shopping cart servlet named ShopServlet. The regular expression patterns corresponding to these transactions could be: 

Login: *Login.jsp

AddToCart: */servlets/ShopServlet?add&*

DeleteFromCart: */servlets/ShopServlet?del&*

• Transactions can also be configured so as to differentiate between requests to the front-end web server and requests to the backend. For example, considering a web site that uses the iPlanet application server, all requests to the back-end application server can be represented by the pattern */cgi-bin/gx.cgi*. Using this approach, a web site operator can track requests sent to the back-end independent of requests targeted at the front-end web server and detect problems associated with the back-end easily.

Here, * represents zero or more characters. The user can also associate an image with the new transaction. One of the images can be selected by enabling the radio button beside it. Finally, clicking on the Add button will add the new transaction.