With their many benefits, services-oriented systems also bring unprecedented new challenges. These distributed systems can span multiple computer systems in numerous geographic locations — either within your enterprise or across the extended enterprise. They might be composites of disparate application code. Some Web services are built on .NET, some on Java and others are created from legacy assets.

What's more, these environments are federated systems that include application components you don't own or control. There might be Web services built by other departments, ones available via packaged applications and others published by partners or external service providers. That means they can change or fail independently and without giving you the ability to customize, alter or repair them.

Non-Invasive, Plug-and-Manage Approach

AmberPoint has pioneered a plug-and-manage approach to SOA governance. Unlike other products, AmberPoint does not require you to change the services or their clients—no retrofitting the code with proprietary controls, inserting proprietary headers or using proprietary APIs. You can deploy AmberPoint completely independently of your SOA application development and deployment efforts.

This non-invasive approach guarantees that:

• You can add management (even after development) without disrupting the client side or the server side.
• You can manage Web services that you cannot modify or those that are not under your control (such as a partner's).
• You are not locked into AmberPoint solutions.

Fully Distributed Implementation

AmberPoint solutions are based on the industry's first fully distributed architecture for SOA governance. Key components are agents, analytical servers and management consoles—all Web services-based and built from the ground up to operate in a distributed fashion.

AmberPoint also offers agentless policy enforcement that delegates runtime policy execution to the SOA infrastructure when policy-capable infrastructure is in place (see below).

AmberPoint Agents are lightweight software entities that you deploy in your services network, either between your Web services and their clients or on the clients themselves. Agents provide the mechanism necessary for instrumenting your Web services. They enforce user-defined management policies for monitoring, auditing, logging, security, routing, transformation, failover or load-balancing. You can use an agent to manage one or more Web services. And you can use any number of agents in your Web services environment.

AmberPoint agents are built using standards-based Web services. They form the common runtime for all AmberPoint governance capabilities. Once deployed, these agents are leveraged by all AmberPoint management solutions. AmberPoint agents can be deployed on both .NET and J2EE Web services containers on platforms of your choice.

Flexible Agent Topologies. The flexibility of its agent-based architecture allows AmberPoint to bring comprehensive management capabilities to every variety of SOA system. AmberPoint offers three types of agents:

Plug-in agents are container-optimized message-stream filters that you deploy in the container hosting your Web services. They eliminate the need for additional message hops between the Web service and its consumers, thus maximizing performance.

Proxy agents are standalone web applications that you can deploy on either the container that hosts your Web services or on a different container. They enable you to decouple your internal Web services from their consumers while enabling you to manage Web services you don't own (packaged applications, legacy systems, external Web services).

Nano agents are ultra-lightweight agents that have zero latency. These observer agents intercept live messages and process them out of band. The application of management policies takes place after the fact, resulting in low overhead for high-throughput environments.

Users can mix and match various agent modes and topologies to create a management environment best suited to their Web services networks.

• All active agents can enforce the same type of management policies
• An agent can be configured to manage one or more Web services. You can evolve your management system as your Web services environment grows.
• Agents can be deployed on the producer side as well as consumer side to manage the Web services network, end to end.
• Proxy agents are available as self-contained bundles that you can simply "drop" into your Web services network.
• Client-side agents automatically enforce policies on the service client, saving developers from implementing management logic on the client.
• Plug-in agents are available as container-specific deployment units that can be attached to the container’s message processing mechanism.
• All agents are available for both .NET and J2EE containers. Mix and match these agents to best suit your environment.

"First-Mile" Policy Enforcement and Visibility. AmberPoint offers an agent that automatically enforces policies on the client side. This saves developers from the responsibility of implementing management logic on clients. This client-side agent enables the system to dynamically adapt to system changes. If a policy is updated on the service, the new policy is automatically downloaded to and enforced at the client.

The system is able to resolve changes to endpoints as well. The client-side agent automatically finds the latest service endpoints in the registry and dynamically routes messages to that up-to-date endpoint. It also allows organizations to monitor system health and performance from the perspective of the client, enabling Operations staff to better understand such issues as network lag.

• Reduces costs by saving developers from the task of implementing management logic to clients
• Delivers greater system agility from insulating clients from changes to management and security policies, precluding the coding and recoding of clients
• Provides a deeper understanding of system performance from the perspective of service consumers

Decentralized Management Services. AmberPoint utilizes task-specific management services for analyzing the data acquired by its agents. AmberPoint distributes workload between agents and these services. While the agents capture and aggregate real-time metrics locally, the management services aggregate this data across multiple agents, process the information out-of-band and maintain the historical view of the data. Deploy multiple management services to scale as your SOA systems evolve.

Role-based Web User Interface. To provide centralized management of the distributed environment, AmberPoint employs a web-based management console. The user interface supports concurrent users enabling multiple remote users to log in and manage the system at the same time. AmberPoint uses a delegated administration scheme to assign roles and responsibilities to each user. Users can integrate these roles with their authentication system of choice via the container on which the management console is deployed.

Because they are fully distributed, AmberPoint solutions merge seamlessly into Web services environments. That's not the case with brokers and engine-based solutions, which conflict with a services-oriented architecture by introducing a single point of failure.

Thus, with the flexibility afforded by AmberPoint's distributed architecture, you can create a federated management environment that's best suited to your network of Web services.

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INDUSTRY'S FIRST AGENTLESS SOA RUNTIME GOVERNANCE

AmberPoint has introduced the industry’s first agentless system for SOA runtime governance. With its ground-breaking new architecture, AmberPoint has decoupled the enforcement of SOA runtime governance policies from the execution of those policies. AmberPoint can now delegate policy execution to existing SOA infrastructure, enabling organizations to better leverage the intrinsic and increasingly sophisticated capabilities of XML appliances, Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), application servers, operating systems and other SOA infrastructure.

Leveraging Policy-Capable Infrastructure. AmberPoint’s new architecture now offers agentless policy enforcement options in addition to existing agent-based mechanisms. AmberPoint delegates runtime policy execution to the SOA infrastructure whenever policy-capable infrastructure is in place, leveraging as much of the native policy execution capabilities of the runtime infrastructure as possible. As a result, enterprises realize greater returns on their investments in SOA platforms and runtime frameworks, while fully utilizing their SOA infrastructure.

Agentless Policy Enforcement:

• Capability-based Delegation of Runtime Policies: Not all infrastructure and platforms are created equal—their runtime execution capabilities and policy support vary. AmberPoint is flexible enough to easily adapt to the different types of capabilities across varying components.
• Fire-and-Forget Policy Rollout: AmberPoint guarantees the delivery of each policy in an automated fashion by tracking the runtime infrastructure and facilitating management of the SOA system as a whole.
• Transparent Support across Platforms: Recognizing that standards for SOA management are evolving, AmberPoint transparently maps runtime policies onto both platform-specific and standards-based interfaces and protocols.

Benefits of Agentless Policy Enforcement:

• Greater ROI from SOA Infrastructure: Ensures optimized execution of SOA runtime governance policies by leveraging built-in platform capabilities.
• Streamlined Administration of Runtime Policies: Instead of administering each policy individually, users can now govern the running SOA environment in an end-to-end fashion.
• Visibility of All Policies System-wide: AmberPoint delivers a single, comprehensive view of all SOA runtime policies across the environment. Users can see what policies exist, where policies are being executed, which services are using them, the status of policies, etc.
• Uninterrupted Runtime Governance: Seamlessly enforces runtime governance regardless of hardware or software.
• Business-centric Policy Decisions: Removes concern for infrastructure from decisions about runtime governance.

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RICH, WEB-BASED USER INTERFACE

AmberPoint solutions feature a visually impactful user interface that is easy to digest, highly interactive and simple to navigate. AmberPoint uses the Flash programming language and AJAX to generate an animated, highly dynamic, real-time visual representation of runtime SOA conditions. The interface is animated and generated at runtime based on the system data collected by the AmberPoint agents that are spread across the IT landscape. As a result, users can quickly identify system hotspots and analyze the problem graphically to resolve outstanding issues.

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Content- and Context-Aware Instrumentation

AmberPoint agents contain instrumentation for capturing the operational and business metrics necessary for understanding the overall health of the SOA environment. You can create instruments to track performance criteria (such as the average response times or number of requests per hour) or to track business-related information (such as the number of purchase orders that contain a certain item). Together, operational and business insight derived from this instrumentation allows you to make decisions such as allocating additional resources to the Web services that process the greatest number of orders, thus enabling you to align your IT goals with business objectives.

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Active Management

AmberPoint agents not only observe the SOA environment, but can also act upon message content. They can execute customized management actions upon receiving a request, response or fault message. They can execute an action immediately or on a schedule. Actions can also be triggered by individual instruments within an agent or executed based on user-defined criteria. Actions can be used individually or combined together to create complex, reusable management tasks.

Active management allows you to enforce critical management functions such as security, routing, failover, load-balancing and versioning. Coupled with the content-aware instrumentation, agents can execute sophisticated management functions, such as content-based routing for prioritizing requests or content-based access control for augmenting container security.

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Dynamic and Extensible

AmberPoint agents are architected from the ground up to deliver self-managing Web services environments. Since they are based on Web services, they can listen to commands from external sources and change their behavior on-the-fly, without requiring a re-start.

The agents can also communicate with other Web services and IT systems while enforcing management policies. Agents enable you to extend your Web services management without adding a single line of code to your Web services. This allows you to create a management environment that dynamically adjusts its behavior based on operational or business characteristics observed by other pieces of your IT environment.

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Performance and Scalability

AmberPoint solutions intelligently optimize the handling of XML messages through a variety of techniques:

• Operations-based branching to skip processing entirely for irrelevant messages
• Partial parsing optimizations to reduce the amount of the message that is parsed
• Out-of-band processing of data consolidation, historical trends and reporting
• Plug-in agents, where appropriate, in order to eliminate extra networking hops
• Distributed workload optimizations so that systems can make maximum use of the distributed environment rather than performing all processing in a centralized location

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Native Implementations in .NET and J2EE

AmberPoint offers the only management solutions that are implemented natively in both .NET and J2EE. You can deploy platform-specific agents for managing heterogeneous Web services throughout the enterprise and manage them all via AmberPoint management console(s). That means you can fully leverage the capabilities and performance advantages of the leading SOA platforms while preserving a distributed environment.

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End-to-End Runtime Management

AmberPoint runtime governance solutions extend across the entire SOA stack, from client applications to the back-end system components, and across all types of message and transport protocols. AmberPoint includes agents that support a wide range of SOA-related components, including databases, JMS and MQ messaging systems, EJB-based applications, and ESBs. This same technology can be used by end users and partners to provide visibility into virtually any type of component, including hardware appliances, new transport protocols, and home-grown solutions. AmberPoint agents provide true end-to-end SOA visibility by delivering information on dependencies, performance, service levels, and exceptions.

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