Historically, this meant a logical unit of work. In the context of APM, however, the term transaction means something different. In a composite application, users or customers will typically perform a number of distinct operations that, however un-connected they may be from the point of view of the systems being accessed and exercised, form an integral action from the perspective of that user or customer. This integral action is what most APM vendors mean by the term transaction. The user-defined transaction profiling technologies will attempt to trace the effects of this transaction across an array of components and network paths.