Real-Time Tracking of Each Transaction End-to-End across the System

Service-orientation begins with software components, then moves toward its ultimate goal of supporting distributed business transactions. In the early stages of an SOA project, it’s critical to discover, assess and monitor existing applications. As service consumers come online, enterprises need the visibility to build achievable service-level agreements. Then comes the hard part—they need to enforce those service level agreements. This means they need the ability to dynamically intervene in the service activity. It will occasionally be necessary to reroute message traffic to new server instances, to change load balancing rules, or to throttle some traffic to provide better service to more valuable customers.

To keep the bad guys out and to keep the good guys honest, services need to be secured. To secure an SOA, you can’t simply “lock the front door.” You need to lock the door to every room in the house. In other words, every application needs to have security awareness—knowing who is allowed to use the application, which specific functions they are allowed to use, and how to prevent eavesdroppers from reading sensitive information, like social security numbers.

While it’s critical to manage services, the deep business value of networked systems is actually associated with the transactions that flow across these composite applications. Yet in many cases, organizations lack any visibility into or capability for tracking and remediating problems with business transactions because they usually span wildly diverse services, packaged applications, process engines, databases and legacy components. Organizations focused on only services may be missing the forest for the trees.

AmberPoint has introduced a way to track transaction flows in real time and across even complex SOA ecosystems.

AmberPoint Business Transaction Management

AmberPoint runtime SOA governance software delivers real-time tracking of each transaction flowing end-to-end across the system. It follows transactions across all SOA infrastructure, including packaged applications—such as customer relationship management (CRM) suites and help desk applications. AmberPoint’s unique message fingerprinting approach prevents the need to modify messages, which can break dependent applications in the system. As a result, AmberPoint’s non-invasive instrumentation enables transactions to flow unhindered across the system.

AmberPoint brings real-time control to orchestrated transactions. With AmberPoint, organizations can measure transaction QoS metrics against their business goals. They can quickly identify and resolve transaction failures and bottenecks. And they can take action to prevent problems—such as throttling transactions by user segment before a compliance failure occurs.

Business Transaction Validation

It’s often difficult and expensive to verify business transactions in any realistic way before moving systems to production. With its SOA Validation System, AmberPoint samples and replays transaction flows against the actual runtime system. For the first time, organizations can validate end-to-end business transactions before deployment, thereby reducing production failures, improving compliance with service level agreements, increasing confidence and creating unparalleled risk reduction.

Capabilities:

• Transaction Tracking: Non-invasively tracks transactions across a wide range of SOA interactions, including those facilitated by SOAP and XML services, messaging systems such as JMS and MQ, database calls, RMI and EJB applications and across various runtime infrastructure—such as ESBs, application servers and appliances.
• Managing Quality of Service: Comprehensive monitoring of services, transactions and business processes across heterogeneous environments for performance goals and errors and automated remediation of issues to prevent outright failures.
• Transaction Diagnosis and Root-Cause Analysis: Detects, alerts and remediates both technical and business-level exceptions. Advanced search capabilities facilitate root-cause analysis and reduce mean time to repair.
• Transaction Monitoring for Business: A rich library of portlets and sophisticated capabilities for capturing and visualizing any business metric.
• Message Fingerprinting: AmberPoint’s unique capabilities for transaction tracking do not require alterations to message headers. As a result, transactions flow unimpeded and without breaking dependent applications, which might not be able to process the altered messages or message headers.