Managing SOA problems

Managing SOA problems in performance and availability efficiently is necessary to ensure reliable SOA operations and to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). This can be challenging in an SOA. SOA systems, by nature, are heterogeneous; they span multi-vendor infrastructure components, including application services, database systems, and network devices. Each of these SOA components must be monitored and managed to meet service-level targets.

Adding to this complexity is the fact that in an SOA, a service may have different performance requirements for different consumers within a single SOA process. The number of varied performance targets can increase when the service is reused by different SOA business processes.

Requirements for Managing SOA Problems

In other words, to meet the business need, an SOA management system must be able to monitor and manage a variety of policies per service—across a heterogeneous SOA network. In particular, it must have the capability to evaluate policy and generate alerts upon policy violations in near real-time and quickly find and resolve the problems. And it must be able to perform this work while minimizing the impact on SOA components' performance.

The Actional Solution for Managing SOA Problems

Based on unique, patent-pending technologies, Progress® Actional® for SOA Operations enables organizations to monitor and manage their SOAs to meet service-level targets efficiently and effectively. Actional provides unprecedented visibility into SOA operations through automatic discovery of all SOA services and their dependencies and, based on this discovery, end-to-end monitoring of SOA transactions across the heterogeneous SOA environment.

These capabilities provide a foundation for early detection of SOA problems through a combination of centralized, policy-based SOA operations management (via the Actional management server) and distributed policy monitoring and evaluation (via Actional agents or points of visibility).

• Policy management of SOA problems. With Actional for SOA Operations, appropriate SOA personnel create and manage policy centrally from the Actional server console with easy-to-use wizards. Policies can be created to monitor response times, data frequency, and frequency of faults and specify service levels on a per-transaction or aggregate statistics basis. Performance thresholds can be set below those defined in SLAs, to enable early detection of problems. Once created, policies are "pushed" down to Actional agents or points of visibility on the SOA network for distributed event monitoring and policy evaluation in the runtime environment.
  
  This architecture enables central management of the entire SOA network while limiting the traffic between the agents and the central server, to maintain SOA performance. If communications between the agents and server are interrupted, the agents continue to monitor SOA traffic and evaluate policy. And they, as well as the server, can send alerts to other connected management systems. So there is no central point of failure.
• Policy-based alerting. Actional agents, which reside on SOA network components, monitor and evaluate SOA traffic based on policy non-intrusively, that is, with almost no impact on service performance. When a service policy is not met, an Actional agent sends an alert to the Actional server. This is displayed in the server console and can be sent by email to support staff or to other common systems management products.
  
  Alerts appear in the console showing the cause of the alert, the alert message, and a flow map of the transaction not meeting the requirements—for use in finding the root cause of the problem.
  
  
• Fast root cause analysis. The flow map provided by the alert is the key to fast problem resolution. It allows SOA personnel to trace back an SOA performance issue to the SOA component that is its source. This is important because it is often difficult to locate the true source of a problem, which may be downstream from where systems appear, especially in the heterogeneous SOA environments in which transactions cross platforms.

For More Information on Managing SOA Problems

To learn more about how Actional for SOA Operations can monitor an SOA end to end and efficiently manage SOA operations problems, download the white paper: Achieving SOA Operations Excellence with Progress Actional.