Web Services Discovery: Consumers

To understand Web services discovery from Actional, imagine putting a service onto the network: Actional's Web services governance solution then automatically tracks down Web services consumers on your network (without any software required on the consumer side – and without any configuration of the service itself).

Since a picture is often worth a thousand words, let's take a look at an Actional auto-discovered Web services flow map:

Web Services Discovery with Actional

Actional's flow map performs automatic Web services discovery on an application with 30+ consumers

The Scenario

  • Software was only installed on one machine: the colored machine in the center, which happens to be a .NET Server.
  • The developer of this application thought there might be a handful of consumers, but didn’t really have any idea. He had shared the WSDL with three or four other development teams.
  • No software at all was installed on the gray hosts, nor was any configuration done to the developer's application (or to the WSDL used by the consumers).
  • If this developer were consuming other Web services, those service providers would show up just like the service consumers have done here.
  • If the Windows server shown in the above screenshot (the colored node) were actually an Actional control point (or a supported hardware XML firewall like IBM DataPower) installed in a DMZ as an XML security firewall, the visibility Actional delivers would enable customer-specific policy / governance / compliance.

Learn the Secrets of Web Services Discovery

Find out how auto-discovery works. Download the free white paper, "Why Runtime Governance is Critcal for SOA," now

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The Challenge

Service-consumer governance is a big challenge because organizations have no way of knowing which Web service consumers are using which services, and what service-level agreements they are receiving. Put another way: organizations may be aware of whom they have allowed to use a service – but how do they know if unauthorized users are accessing a service ... and who those users may be?

In the same way, how does IT know if all critical business and security policies are being applied if it doesn't even know if the service or consumer even exists? The problem is the same with SLAs: there is no way to know how the SLAs that customers are receiving compare to what they've been promised.

Actional to the Rescue

Performing discovery with Actional solves these problems because it provides a way for IT to track and “bill” for those services in use. Actional gives IT the visibility into critical services and business processes that users throughout the business need.

In many situations, customers have discovered development applications using production services (or vice versa). But Actional goes further, providing visibility into a wide range of SOA management issues:

  • If there are 10 consumers of a service, how will the 11th impact the other consumers?
  • How much service capacity is available for new consumers wishing to access my service?
  • A service response time averages 1s. Are my 10 service consumers satisfied?
  • I've been developing a service, and it's moved to production. I want to move my development server to a new project, is anyone still using it?
  • I've created a new service, but I'm not sure how useful it is. I wonder who in the organization is using it and what they're using it for.
  • I've developed a simple service, and it's being used so much, that I have no more capacity. But, I don't have budget to add capacity. How do I track and bill infrastructure and additional development to those using the service in a consistent and fair manner?

Of course, this can be looked at from the consumer perspective as well:

  • I would like to use service X, but I'm not sure what response time it's been delivering, and response time is critical to me. I know what the service provider says, but is that really the performance I'll get?
  • I'm using a service from another part of the organization, and they want me to contribute to their budget. I know others are using the service for free, why should I pay?
  • How well has service provider A delivered on the SLAs that they've promised others? Can I trust their planning abilities?
  • Group G has a less-than-desirable reliability history, and I know they're using Service X. How will Group G failures affect my performance?

Conclusion

Web services discovery of consumers on the network is essential: from the perspective of security, effective management and to aid in meeting service-level agreements. Fortunately, Actional's automatic Web services discovery of consumers provides just the set of capabilities required by IT.

For More Information

Find out why automated Web services consumer discovery is essential for your services network: download the free webinar, Next Generation SOA Management: Introducing Business Process Visibility for SOA