SOA Network Visibility

Complete SOA network visibility is essential to operating an SOA successfully. Yet monitoring an SOA end-to-end isn't easy. The loosely coupled services that make up an SOA business process execute across disparate, heterogeneous computing resources, some of which may be external to the company. In other words, there's no single silo to monitor, as there is with traditional enterprise applications.

Without SOA Network Visibility: SOA Operations Problems

As a result, once services are deployed, several questions arise:

• How can you track the performance and availability of services actually in production, including what their interdependencies on other SOA consumers and producers are, who is really using them, and how often?
• How do you ensure quality of service—end-to-end and throughout the service lifecycle—to check whether SOA services are working as designed in production?
• How can you understand what the impact of an unexpected change or problem in services will be, i.e., what other services and end users will the change affect?
• How do you detect problems before they occur?
• Once a problem occurs, how do you find the root cause as quickly and efficiently as possible, to ensure quick resolution?

These problems require SOA network visibility to answer. In addition, traditional application management tools aren't much help. They provide measures such as average response times. But in an SOA, what is needed are SOA performance measures on a per-consumer or as-used basis—i.e., to ensure SOA performance conforms to the conditions set in various policies, for example, in specific service-level agreements (SLAs).

SOA Network Visibility: An SOA Governance Component

SOA network visibility is not a trivial matter. Being able to monitor an SOA end-to-end is a key component of an SOA governance strategy. While many people associate the term "SOA governance" with registries and repositories—and these tools are fundamental components of SOA governance—they aren't the whole story. SOA monitoring is critical to ensure the effective performance and availability of the SOA IT infrastructure and adherence to SLAs, as well as to troubleshoot the source of SOA issues.

SOA Network Visibility: The Actional Solution

Progress® Actional® for SOA Operations solves the SOA network visibility problem with points of visibility (or visibility agents). These are deployed in the application server environments and other devices that comprise the SOA. The points of visibility automatically discover the process flows of messages throughout the SOA, which then are correlated and mapped, to reveal all interdependencies between the services. The result is end-to-end SOA network visibility—not just across Web service traffic, but across HTTP, RMI, EJB, and database calls as well.

What's more, this automatic discovery and mapping occurs without any custom coding or special configuration and without introducing any performance impact or measurable overhead on the systems on which the agents reside. In fact, this monitoring activity takes less than 1% of the CPU power.

Other SOA Network Visibility Benefits: Root Cause Analysis

End-to-end SOA network visibility is a key component of delivering quality of service and keeping customers and other SOA end users happy. It allows you to monitor service levels and set performance thresholds to find problems early, before they affect end users.

Just as important, when performance issues do occur, Actional is able to capture snapshots of the end-to-end problematic SOA transaction. These snapshots allow SOA owners to drill down through all the services and operations that were called in order to track down the system that is the root cause of the problem. Traceability is important because the root cause of a problem is often several steps removed from the symptoms which first impact end users. Finding a problem quickly is, obviously, necessary for resolving it quickly and resuming effective service.

For More Information on SOA Network Visibility

Find out more about the role of SOA network visibility in SOA success and the benefits it can provide. Register to watch the free on-demand webinar: "Operating Your SOA—Are You Up to the Challenge?"