Web Services Agent

The Web Services agent approach can be used to manage your services and give you visibility into, and control over, business processes running on your network.

Web Services Agent-Based Approach with Actional Active Agents

A customer would use Actional Active Agents if they wanted a simple way to catalog and track all services in use within the enterprise, gather performance statistics, create and manage policy, understand how services interact with one another, and troubleshoot operations.

With the agent-based SOA architecture from Actional, organizations benefit through the ability to:

• Quickly and consistently gain visibility into how services are being used and by whom without additional coding or logging of applications
• Provision for managed Service Level Agreements (SLA)
• Gather end-to-end statistics, understand the relationships between services, and perform operational analysis on the relationship between services
• Deliver a reference based-architecture, enabling you to install and run your application, regardless of changes (e.g., you don't have to reconfigure every time you change the WSDL or add an application).

In this configuration, Actional Active Agents would be installed at each application server. The key advantage of this approach is end-to-end visibility into the flow of messages across the network. Actional Looking Glass, a centralized management server and console, is also used. For simplicity, Looking Glass can be installed on the same machine as the agents.

Even in a simple network of services, this approach provides the benefits of total visibility along with rapid problem root-cause analysis and resolution. Actional's patent-pending Flow-Mapping™ technology eliminates the guess-work for troubleshooting policy violations with a near real-time display of the patterns of messages across the network.

In this configuration, a .NET Active Agent would be installed on each application server providing Web services. The installation of Active Agents is simple. Unlike other management solutions, Actional's Active Agents do not need to be configured for each individual application in the application server. The Active Agent runs inside the SOAP stack of the application server, so is extremely high performing, adding less than 100 microseconds of round-trip latency to messages. A description of the Active Agent architecture can be provided upon request.

Automatic Discovery

Once the Looking Glass Server is installed, the agented nodes are identified and assigned an icon. With Looking Glass, in the Web services agent scenario, discovery of services is automatic. In fact, Looking Glass Console will automatically draw all consumers of services onto the display, even if they are not agented, as the solution can discover systems with one degree of separation from an instrumented node (this is another unique benefit to the Actional WSMP).