SOA Failure: Business Impact

The trouble with today's network and system monitoring tools is that they measure the operation and performance of "stacks:" layers of hardware, network software, protocols – even services. But these tools don't give users a picture of the critical processes that drive their businesses – or of the business impact, department by department, customer by customer, of SOA failure when it occurs.

Legacy Monitoring Tools Don't Deliver Where it Counts

Another example of the limitations of current monitoring technologies: Imagine being informed that over the last hour five percent of "buy transactions" failed or missed the service-level agreement (SLA's). This is important information, but tells only part of the story. Consider a few of the real business issues that this kind of reporting does not address:

• Which real users of these SOA transactions were specifically affected?
• How much money was lost because of the failure?
• Were any of the real users "gold" customers?
• Where in the process did the issues occur?
• What servers exactly were these transactions flowing through?
• When will the issue be resolved?

Mapping Out Business Processes and Supporting IT Infrastructure

Getting clear answers to these kinds of questions is the only way for both the business and IT sides of the organization to address the impact of a failure and provide the information for a speedy fix. Actional is designed to address the shortcomings of traditional approaches, to provide true business process visibility, with:

• Visibility into each and every occurrence of real business processes, not just into synthetically created transactions. The visibility provided by Actional Looking Glass enables organizations to measure and report on actual service levels, broken down either by business process or by configurable business criteria, such as customer, region, or business unit.
• Visibility into every activity that is part of the business processes, not just the "foreground" transactions. This capability enables Actional Looking Glass to determine if the entire business process, end to end, is operating as expected. If not, Looking Glass can automatically perform triage to determine exactly where the process is failing in its flow across the many connected tiers and applications within the architecture.
• Visibility when something doesn't happen, is becoming a key concern, but traditional monitoring can only report when something does happen. Only when you understand the business process can you know and predict what should happen. We should get a response from the inventory system within X seconds, if not the purchase transaction is hung, waiting for it.
• Visibility into shared, dynamic, and loosely coupled systems that will become more and more common as SOA becomes widely adopted. This drives the need to automatically map out the exact set of application-level infrastructure that supports a given business process. Especially when multiple business processes overlap and share some of the same systems, services or applications.