monitoring an entry point of the application for a transaction to selectively monitor the transaction within a plurality of transactions in the application in order to minimize computational overhead and data recording associated with monitoring all of the plurality of transactions in the application, wherein the entry point is a location in the application where the transaction is recorded by a monitoring application, and wherein each transaction in the plurality of transactions is associated with a corresponding token that includes data that uniquely identifies an associated transaction and contains configuration information required by a probe that monitors an entry point in the application where the associated transaction occurs to determine an appropriate level of data recording for the associated transaction;

responsive to the entry point being reached by the application for the transaction, acquiring a token associated with the transaction, wherein the token is acquired by looking up the transaction in a policy mapper, and wherein the policy mapper maps a monitoring policy to the transaction from a list of monitoring policies;

monitoring the transaction according to the monitoring policy of the token associated with the transaction, wherein the monitoring policy contains a host name, a user name, an application name, a transaction name, scheduling information that defines when the transaction is recorded, a threshold that defines an execution time limit for the transaction, and the configuration information that determines the appropriate level of data recording for the transaction, and wherein the monitoring policy of the token determines what specific information is gathered about the transaction, and wherein the transaction includes a plurality of sub-transactions, and wherein each sub-transaction within the plurality of sub-transactions is associated with the monitoring policy of the token;

collecting the appropriate level of data recording for the transaction defined by the configuration information; and

sending the collected appropriate level of data recording for the transaction to the monitoring application, wherein the monitoring application records the collected appropriate level of data recording for the transaction for use by a user of the monitoring application.