The SOA Foundation: Managing SOA Operations

For a reliable SOA foundation, companies must be able to monitor and control SOA operations. This is essential to ensure that services work smoothly, serve the business need, and function according to security, regulatory, and business policies.

However, managing operations in the loosely coupled SOA environment isn't easy.

The SOA Foundation Challenge

In traditional computing, each application is a silo. It lines up in a one-to-one relationship with a business process and runs on a clearly defined set of SOA infrastructure (see below). The IT group in charge of the application can trace the problem from a bottom-up view of the systems and servers involved with the application.

An SOA breaks down silos. It’s a loosely-coupled environment linking services that may be both inside and outside of the enterprise, in which business processes span silos. There is no one team to go to when problems crop up, and there is no clear bottom-up view of the infrastructure, as shown below.

Unlike traditional application silos, there is no SOA visibility into connections between loosely coupled computing processes.

Without visibility into how computing processes are connected, a company can't measure how they are working, spot problems and fix them quickly, figure out how it's going to secure what's going on, and, in general, control and optimize its SOA environment to support the business.

The Actional SOA Foundation: Providing Visibility into SOA Operations

Progress Actional products provide a SOA management solution that can address these issues. Actional provides a SOA foundation with visibility into the performance and availability of end-to-end business processes in the runtime environment. This allows companies to spot the root cause of problems and fix them quickly.

Specifically, Progress Actional automatically discovers and dynamically updates the interrelationships between systems as an actual transaction flows throughout the SOA. The result is a flow map (see below) that couples all of the systems, processes, and services that are part of an actual SOA transaction – end to end. As a result, when a problem occurs in SOA operations, the snapshot of the flow map allows IT to trace back the process and discover the root cause of a problem as illustrated in the following figure.

When a problem in SOA operations appeared in an order processing system, Actional was able to discover that the root cause was the financial system connected to it.

This end-to-end business process visibility and root cause analysis capability allow companies to control SOA operations — and establish a firm SOA foundation. When problems occur, they can get to the root quickly and act to keep things operating very efficiently.

For More Information on Deploying a Reliable SOA Foundation

To find out more about the key capabilities for deploying a sound SOA foundation, download "Jumpstarting an SOA in Your SAP Environment".