Abstract: A system that automatically provides a root cause analysis for performance issues associated with an application, a tier of nodes, an individual node, or a business transaction. One or more distributed business transactions are monitored and data obtained from the monitoring is provided to a controller. The controller analyzes the data to identify performance issues with the business transaction, tiers of nodes, individual nodes, methods, and other components that perform or affect the business transaction performance. Once the performance issues are identified, the cause of the issues is determined as part of a root cause analysis.