A method and apparatus for monitoring memory accesses in hardware to support transactional execution is herein described. Attributes are monitor accesses to data items without regard for detection at physical storage structure granularity, but rather ensuring monitoring at least at data items granularity. As an example, attributes are added to state bits of a cache to enable new cache coherency states. Upon a monitored memory access to a data item, which may be selectively determined, coherency states associated with the data item are updated to a monitored state. As a result, invalidating requests to the data item are detected through combination of the request type and the monitored coherency state of the data item.