SOA Metrics

The right SOA metrics are the key to helping align an SOA with business goals. However, according to IDC research, C-level executives judge the inability to measure the effectiveness of IT systems and business processes as one of its top IT problems. What's the underlying difficulty and how can companies remedy the situation?

Inadequate SOA Metrics

Many organizations are going after the wrong SOA metrics and, as a result, don't have helpful indicators that can lead to improvements. Here's a list of the top five mistakes in measuring SOA performance:

Focusing on the parts and not the whole.

If you're buying a book from Amazon, what you care about is how long it takes to receive your book. Yet IT often measures process components: such as the response time between clicking "Submit Order" and receiving the emailed confirmation—not what's important to customers.

Using IT metrics that can't be related directly to business impact.

Many organizations provide only IT metrics—like 99.7% availability. This doesn't relate availability to business processes or outcomes, for example, how much money is lost per minute if some computing resources are down.

Using business metrics that can't be tied back to an IT context.

Some organizations deliver only pure business metrics, such as dollars of orders shipped. While such numbers are important, they don't help with troubleshooting if the number drops. For example, is the number of orders entered different from the number of orders submitted? Having metrics for the different services can help pinpoint and address what impacts the business.

Focusing on the service, not the consumption of the service.

One example is the IT metric "average service response time." But if several business units using a service have service-level agreements (SLAs) guaranteeing 8 second response times, "average response time" doesn't tell you if you are meeting all SLAs.

Assuming everyone is equal.

Often, not every customer, partner, region, or sales channel is equal. Some deliver more revenue than others. Some don’t provide revenue commensurate with their usage of SOA infrastructure and systems. Organizations need relevant metrics—for example, visits per channel versus dollars per channel per specific customers— to align the SOA with the business.

The Wrong Tools for Providing the Right SOA Metrics

A typical SOA transaction contains many services executing on heterogeneous systems. But many IT tools can only report on the health of an individual application or machine. Other tools give, at best, rudimentary IT metrics such as average response times. There's no business process visibility. What's more, most IT management tools are used after users report problems; there's no way to actively manage the SOA in synch with business objectives.

Still other tools, for example, for business activity monitoring (BAM), provide valuable business metrics, but can't tie these figures to processing on the SOA network. In fact, organizations often have IT management systems and BAM dashboards, but can't connect the business metrics to the underlying IT processing.

Progress Actional: Connecting Business Metrics to SOA Processes

There is a tool that looks at services with the eyes of the business: Progress® Actional® for Continuous Service Optimization. Actional automatically discovers end-to-end SOA business processes and maps them onto the SOA infrastructure. It also allows users to view the process or any individual service by user-configurable business metrics: for example, dollars of orders sold by customer, orders by region, and lapsed order to fulfillment by business unit, to name a few.

These SOA metrics provide decision support for managing the SOA to the needs of the business and customers, rather than just against IT requirements—allowing companies to align their SOA with the business by optimizing services.

Actional for Continuous Service Optimization also actively supports the business. Actional agents called "points of control" reside on the network and access the business-level information. Based on user-defined policies and other mechanisms, these agents change SOA behavior dynamically to prioritize service usage—for example, to align SOA capacity based on the revenue potential of a channel or customer.

For More Information on Using SOA Metrics to Support Business Goals

Learn how to improve your SOA and your business. Download the Webinar "Continuous Service Optimization: How Use SOA to Better Serve Your Business Goals."