A system and method for the distributed analysis of high frequency transaction trace data to constantly categorize incoming transaction data, identify relevant transaction categories, create per-category statistical reference and current data and perform statistical tests to identify transaction categories showing overall statistically relevant performance anomalies. The relevant transaction category detection considers both the relative transaction frequency of categories compared to the overall transaction frequency and the temporal stability of a transaction category over an observation duration. The statistical data generated for the anomaly tests contains next to data describing the overall performance of transactions of a category also data describing the transaction execution context, like the number of concurrently executed transactions or transaction load during an observation period. Anomaly tests consider current and reference execution context data in addition to statistic performance data to determine if detected statistical performance anomalies should be reported.