SOA Capabilities of Actional Looking Glass Runtime Governance

Many of the SOA technologies discussed in the previous tutorial are part of the Actional Looking Glass product. Looking Glass has, in fact, been integrated such that it works very effectively with the Systinet Registry and repository. These SOA governance solutions go a long way toward optimizing the SOA lifecycle.

Advanced SOA Capabilities of Actional Looking Glass

Actional SOA management features and "operational" level of visibility. Meaning that, in combination with the automatic FlowMap™, Actional Looking Glass gives IT users the ability to understand each and every business process. IT can understand not only which consumers and providers were involved, but they can understand the context of the transaction.

So, combining that type of technology, not only do users understand everything in a service-to-service relationship, but they understand everything at a higher business-relationship level. This allows users to manage transactions and processes at the business level. Tackling questions like: should certain transactions have priorities over other transactions?

Significance of Key SOA Capabilities

Why is this important? Because a lot of times policies start to come into play here. People are starting to move more and more from scenarios where policy lives with Operations to scenarios where governance lies with the business. What we mean by this, for example, is that "buy" transactions will have more value to the company than, say, inventory-lookup transactions.

Which means that policies will need to be implemented on the network such that buy transactions receive priority over inventory-lookup transactions. It's a simple matter of serving customers best. But without SOA management, accomplishing this goal will be very challenging, to say the least.

SOA Capabilities Help to Synchronize Runtime Data

Elsewhere we discussed how runtime information is synchronized with the registry, giving IT the ability not only to pull information from the registry and apply it in runtime, but also to take a lot of the runtime metadata and put it back into the registry so that people upstream who are developing can understand what's happening in the in the "real world".

For More Information

Dig into the details of Actional's SOA capabilities: Download the free white paper, SOA Primer: Comprehensive Runtime Governance from Actional