SOA makes it easy to deliver new business applications in the form of service composites or business processes that orchestrate multiple business services. However, with layers of services coupled together, it becomes more difficult to manually track the business flowing through a system. That’s because pieces of information are scattered across multiple log files, across multiple servers across potentially different geographical locations.

Neither IT nor business teams have had the visibility they need to efficiently manage these composites or processes. In fact, they typically first discover exceptions through cryptic log entries or calls from vexed customers. What typically follows are resource-intensive fire-drills and finger-pointing across various teams, increasing maintenance overheads incurred by IT. At the same time, disrupted or failed business transactions result in lower customer satisfaction, lost orders, lower revenue and general inefficiencies.

To prevent their SOAs from turning into "black-boxes," enterprises need more granular visibility into these applications and business processes. Visibility into just the individual services is no longer sufficient.

AmberPoint tracks message flows, gives message-level visibility and provides tools for diagnosis and resolution

The AmberPoint Solution

AmberPoint offers the industry’s most comprehensive capabilities for gaining visibility into and diagnosing SOA-based composite applications and business processes in real-time.

AmberPoint tracks individual messages SOA-wide and automatically correlates them into their respective transaction or process flows. This unique vantage point offers a business-centric view into the system, providing central visibility into each message flow from start to finish. This eliminates the need to manually piece together a message flow by searching multiple log files.

AmberPoint delivers its capabilities in a heterogeneous environment and is able to track message flows across different components of your SOA infrastructure—including different application servers, process engines, ESBs, etc. Using a patent-pending approach, AmberPoint gains visibility without inserting proprietary tags or tokens in messages or transport headers. AmberPoint’s advanced technology also ensures that the system can model and track all types of flows, synchronous or asynchronous.

AmberPoint also provides sophisticated instrumentation to detect various types of exception conditions, either business or technical. When coupled with built-in tools to examine individual messages, replay transactions and submit test messages, this ability slashes the time it takes to diagnose runtime issues from hours to minutes.

ADVANCED CAPABILITIES

Groundbreaking features for fine grained visibility into and diagnosis of transactions and processes.

Transaction & Process Flow Tracking
Tracks individual Web service transactions or processes and automatically correlates messages to monitor from each flow, from start to finish:

• Monitoring of synchronous and asynchronous message flows in real-time
• Track start-to-finish response times across multiple steps and define SLAs
• Monitor for exceptions of various types
• Access system-wide service interactions through a single web-based console
• Inspect messages as formatted XML or as HTML forms

Fine-Grained Auditing & Logging
Log end-to-end message trails for compliance (Sarbanes Oxley, Patriot Act, etc.) as well as diagnostics:

• Control how, what and how much is logged – messages, headers or specific elements
• Filter sensitive data, such as credit card and social security numbers
• Trigger logging only after the transaction has reached a specific checkpoint
• Log to database or files

Proactive Detection of Exceptions
Proactive monitoring of system-wide flows for exceptions of various types:

• Detect technical or business-level exceptions
• Leverage built-in and user-defined detection criteria
• Real-time capabilities allow detection of exceptions as they occur
• Alerts IT personnel, business managers or other systems
• Patent-pending distributed exception-detection technique for optimal performance

Sophisticated Root-Cause Analysis
Rapidly diagnose root-cause and resolve exceptions by eliminating guess work:

• Search based on message content, time of arrival, message type, or client credentials to narrow-down suspects
• Examine individual messages or correlated flows to understand entire context
• Compare transactions side-by-side to quickly identify the problem
• Reproduce identified problems for developers by replaying the errant transactions or flows

Multi-Mode Exception Response
Minimize business impact of exceptions through automated exception handling:

• Rule-based routing of exceptions to service-based exception handlers
• Respond in-line with the message flow to resolve exceptions in-flight
• Respond out-of-band to take action after-the-fact
• Respond manually to correct bad messages and resubmit them to services
• Annotate exceptions with comments and tracking status of exceptions
• Integrates with existing IT resources, such as in-house exception-handling business processes or custom Web services

Impact Analysis and Reporting
Provides a rich repository of queryable operational information for business impact analysis:

• Understand which exceptions impact your systems most frequently
• Identify the services most vulnerable to exceptions
• Generate exception status reports for IT and business managers
• Prioritize allocation of resources based on time-to-resolve
• Exception management database integrates with in-house reporting tools for custom reporting

Manages All Types of Exceptions
Detects exceptions in all tiers of the Web service environment:

• System level: Including various SOAP faults, transports and network-level errors
• Application level: Including data errors such as missing values, invalid parameters and anomalies
• Business level: Including missing elements and non-compliance with regulations or business policies