SOA Benefits: The Technical Benefits of Actional Web Services Management

SOA benefits are becoming increasingly clear to enterprises around the globe. Following are the unique technical benefits of Actional's SOA management solution. These benefits include:

• Low latency, high performance
• Reliability
• Simple set-up
• No need to modify applications
• GUI-driven policy set-up

Understand how Actional Looking Glass manages the a SOA architecture: read the tutorial.

High Performance

The asynchronous nature of the agent architecture allows it to be high performance, introducing on the order of only 25 nanoseconds of latency per message — essentially immeasurable in a typical distributed system. In times of high system stress, if even 25 µseconds is too much, the interceptors can be disabled with a single click in the central configuration console.

Efficiency, Reliability, Simple Set-up

The in-memory flight-data-recorder architecture of the agent analyzer allows it to minimize CPU usage on the machine under normal circumstances, while at the same time preserving all necessary information in case a problem does occur and needs to be analyzed.

No Need to Modify or Customize Your Software

Because the interceptors are specific to a given platform (and thus understand how the platform internally handles process, session, security, and other state) there is no need to make any modifications to the applications themselves. Just install the interceptor with the application server or application platform, and all applications (custom or packaged) built on the platform will be managed immediately and automatically.

Small-Footprint Interceptors: Real-Time Data Control

The small footprint of the interceptors ensures that the reliability of the application is not impacted by the management system. Even if the agent analyzer fails or is terminated, the application will continue to run so that the business is not impacted. Moreover, once a business process is defined, each user type or role has an opportunity to put rules in place, as well as configure the type of real-time data they want reported in a customized portal. It is also possible to define actions or alerts to be executed in the event a rule or policy is broken.

Setting up Policies is a Breeze

Policies are easily created via a point-and-click set of check boxes. The functionality is very similar to the approach used with Microsoft Outlook. While easy-to-use, these features are very robust and enable granular definitions. For example, a purchase process may warrant the following: no customer transaction should take more eight seconds, and no gold customer transaction more than six seconds, and the average of all purchases should be under seven seconds.

In other examples, the Accounting department may want to enact a rule governing the process that ensures an entire approved sequence of events is observed. Any deviation would trigger an automated audit function in Looking Glass to capture all information regarding the specific transaction. The security team may want to apply rules that apply specifically to the purchase process, with polices that provide for an end-to-end overview of the process as a whole rather than just a series of checkpoints. Actional delivers "Trust Zones" that helps address today's security vulnerabilities of "last mile" and "man in the middle." As noted, each team can set up these rules very easily with a rules wizard that is specific to their roles. Equally important is that other users cannot alter the rules of other groups.

Conclusion

While SOA is without doubt the wave of the present and future, it cannot be implemented (or even planned for) without factoring in a robust SOA management solution such as those offered by Actional. Actional offers extremely high performance, reliability, efficiency, real-time data control and ease of deployment – with no need to modify your applications!

For More Information

Find out why it's not wise to do without SOA governance: read the free white paper, SOA Primer: Comprehensive Runtime Governance from Actional