Web Services Map: Flow Mapping™ Technolgy from Actional

A flow map is a Web services map—an automatically generated application topology map showing message traffic as it flows through the network. Note that the "auto-discovered" systems (see the gray icons) do not have any software from Actional installed on them. Flow mapping is essential for the facilitation, for example, of policy application.

There are many obvious artifacts to share with a registry: for example, owner, location, security, and policy requirements. Actional also uniquely shares service interrelationship (dependency) information via flow maps. Dependency information is critical on a daily basis for performing root cause analysis, for capacity planning for upgrades, for versioning services, and for scheduling maintenance windows. Flow mapping can even be used to track business processes; and with support for asynchronous messaging, policies can be triggered when things happen (events) or when they don't (non-events).

Flow Mapping: A typical Web services map as shown in Actional.

Web service dependencies are automatically discovered and never need to be configured manually. In addition, notice the gray systems in the map above. These systems never have any Actional software installed; Actional can manage one node away from any agented node. Finally, even traffic lines represent information. In the case above, they show the relative traffic volume. For example, we can see that the path between OrderMgmt and DataCenterGW to logistics is the most heavily used.

Flow mapping is important because of the way policies are applied. Policies take advantage of the flow mapping capabilities to know when there are downstream problems that relate to service-level commitments upstream. For example, the CSR portal, communicating to the enterprise service bus via the CustomerGW, may have a response time SLA of 1s. Though the CustomerGW is functioning fine, perhaps the Logistics system on the back-end is not. Actional is aware of the dependency between the two, and how the SLA relates, and can generate an alert to help significantly reduce down time and service-level violations.

Keep in mind that the SLAs are path and process dependent. Think of a service being used by two different consumers. In the map above, CSR Portal and Domestic Customer, each use the "Inventory Management" service slightly differently. The CSR Portal users' transaction goes through the CustomerGW, then Order Management, and then to Inventory Management. But the Domestic customer's transaction travels through the CustomerGW, through the ESB, and then to the Inventory Management service. The average responsiveness of the Inventory Management service is not nearly as valuable as the responsiveness for each type of user or the exact path traveled, which in this example is not the same.

For these reasons, the Web services map (flow map) and auto-discovery of the path and dependencies are all key for governance and polices based on user or transaction types.

For More Information

To better understand the benefits of Web services flow mapping: watch a free Webinar entitled: "Next Generation SOA Management: Introducing Business Process Visibility for SOA."