Keeping your design-oriented activities inline with the deployed realities of the service network can be challenging. The runtime environment may gradually diverge from the expectations built into the designs, which can cause design resources to be seen as less than fully effective. The challenge, then, is to continually synchronize in both directions—update runtime resources with design resources, while feeding data about the runtime environment back into design tools. Such bi-directional communication facilitates visibility as well as providing information and metrics that aid decision-making about the management of the system as a whole.

AmberPoint bridges the gap between design-time governance tools and runtime management by integrating with any UDDI v3 compliant registry or repository. It exchanges design-time metadata and runtime information bi-directionally with repositories.

AmberPoint automatically synchronizes services metadata recorded in a registry—as well as the policies associated with those services—with the actual runtime state of your SOA. This exchange of information enables documentation of discrepancies between design/development intentions and runtime realities. For instance, it identifies rogue services and submits them for approval. Ad hoc management policies are brought to the notice of system owners. Administrators can also ensure that consumers are accessing managed service endpoints—endpoints that have been authorized for use.

Synchronizing Policy
AmberPoint retrieves policies referenced in registries and enforces them at runtime, as well as publishing new policies to registries.

Not only does AmberPoint synchronize data, it also ensures that policies are applied to services as intended by the SOA architects and managers. AmberPoint automatically enforces policies discovered in accordance with the policy assignment rules described in the registry. This advanced capability enables enterprises to establish closed-loop control over the delivery and lifecycle of their SOA applications.

Service Metadata
AmberPoint automatically discovers services recorded in the registry as well as adding to the registry any new, previously unlisted (or rogue) services discovered in the running environment. AmberPoint updates the registry with changes to service endpoints made in the running environment—such as the creation of managed endpoints in the form of proxies and virtual services.

AmberPoint can submit all synchronized information (services, endpoints and policies) to the registry/repository’s approval process, which allows review of all information before promotion to the production environment.

Runtime Metrics and Service Scorecards
AmberPoint updates the registry/repository with current runtime status information such as whether the service is runtime management enabled. This allows users to get a summary view of what parts of their system are actively managed by AmberPoint at runtime.

Only AmberPoint publishes Service Scorecards to SOA registries. These scorecards display vital data—such as throughput, availability, response times, faults, service level agreement violations and exceptions—across a choice of intervals (last day, last week, last month, etc.). This enables developers to choose services based on their behavior and helps architects to understand service characteristics relative to the intended performance of the system. AmberPoint also publishes service-to-consumer dependencies to the registry, facilitating impact analysis based on actual runtime usage.