The point of SOA applications is to enable real-time business. That's why application managers must ensure these applications are reliable enough to support the daily business of the enterprise. In operational terms, the goal is to ensure that individual components underlying the applications are highly available and responsive, and that the user experience is free of errors and outages.

However, the distributed nature of SOA exponentially increases the risk of failure by liquidating application silos into multiple components scattered across a network. 24x7 production environments demand comprehensive system-wide tracking and operational visibility to minimize failures and downtime.

In many scenarios, service consumers and end-users of SOA applications require certain levels of performance and availability. This is especially the case when performance degradation or failure might result in financial losses. Such assurances are often inked in legally binding business documents as Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Other times, they are simply tacit agreements between two parties. Service level management is crucial to any organization planning to make production use of enterprise SOA—no matter how far along the adoption path they are.

Thus, it becomes critical to proactively monitor the deployed SOA applications, including individual services, transactions and the flow of business through the system.

AmberPoint offers the industry's most comprehensive tools for monitoring SOA applications. AmberPoint software ensures that loosely coupled systems meet expectations for quality of service and are highly available to their end users.

Service Monitoring

AmberPoint monitors system traffic in real time in order to keep enterprises apprised of the real-time behavior of each application component. It provides a rich snapshot of vital runtime data such as throughput, availability, response times and faults—across various slices of time.

AmberPoint monitors all flavors of SOA services, ranging from SOAP and XML Web services to virtually any application service or legacy component—such as EJBs, Plain Old Java Objects, etc. AmberPoint can instrument virtually any distributed application service.

AmberPoint performs monitoring tasks in a way that is efficient and non-invasive. It does not require additional development expense, or modification to services or message traffic.

Business Process and Transaction Monitoring

AmberPoint monitors not only individual components within an SOA application architecture, but also enables application managers to monitor the real-time health and availability of the composite applications that contain these services. By tracking the flow of each transaction or business process from client applications to the service, to the back-end system components, and across all types of message and transport protocols, AmberPoint delivers the vantage point necessary to successfully operate any SOA application. AmberPoint is unique in this capability.

AmberPoint is able to track transactions across a wide range of SOA interactions, including those facilitated by messaging systems such as JMS and MQ, database calls, RMI and EJB applications, and across various runtime infrastructures such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESBs), application servers and appliances.

Service Level Management and Usage Tracking

AmberPoint brings predictability, visibility and control to SOA applications by delivering comprehensive service level management for services, transactions and business processes across heterogeneous environments.

Users can set different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for discrete business segments and prioritize service use by any business criteria—such as focusing on most valuable users (customers, partners, etc.) or providing the best Quality of Service (QoS) during peak hours. SLAs can be set and monitored for individual services as well as composites such as processes and transactions.

Knowing who's using what is also a critical aspect of understanding and controlling SOA systems. That's why AmberPoint records and archives service performance as well as usage for historical analysis. AmberPoint supports detailed usage analysis over time to help identify trends and revenue opportunities.

AmberPoint prevents service problems by providing early warnings, facilitating impact analysis and initiating timely response. It has the unique capability of preventing traffic spikes and overloads from impacting the system by selectively throttling traffic before peak capacity is reached. This service throttling feature is particularly valuable in protecting new SOA investments—such as SOA-enabled mainframe systems—from unexpected demand. Throttling may also be used to prioritize delivery of services based on business criteria.

Business Activity Monitoring

Application managers find it a challenge to understand the actual flow of business within their SOA systems.

AmberPoint meets this need by providing a rich library of widgets and sophisticated capabilities for capturing and visualizing any business metric. It does this by monitoring the content of messages in real-time, as they flow through the SOA system. Examples include key properties—such as order totals or purchase amounts—aggregated across multiple business flows.

Again, all measurements are performed without requiring any alteration to the application code, service logic or message traffic. This non-invasive approach also enables users to customize measurements on-the-fly, without interrupting the running system.