AmberPoint Adapter for MOM 2005

End-to-End Systems Management with AmberPoint and MOM

To enhance and extend its integration with the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, AmberPoint has leveraged the MOM Connector Framework and has built a customized Management Pack, the AmberPoint Adapter for MOM 2005, to deliver bidirectional communication between AmberPoint Web services management solutions and MOM 2005.

Through this enhanced integration, MOM is made more "aware" of the performance and availability of Web services that have not been instrumented using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) as well as Web services that are built using technologies other than Microsoft .NET. A MOM operator will be able to continue using the MOM console as the first-point-of-monitoring. When a performance- or availability-related event appears within MOM, the operator will drill-down into the event and launch AmberPoint (e.g., Service Level Manager). As a result, the operator is freed from constantly monitoring multiple consoles. Additionally, since the MOM console provides the operator with knowledge about system-level events, he or she can more effectively deal with system-related performance issues in Web services.

With its custom instrumentation, AmberPoint extends Microsoft MOM's monitoring capabilities in the following areas:

Performance Monitoring
Availability Monitoring
Authorization and Access Control
Real-time Business Monitoring

Bidirectional Command and Control

AmberPoint can relay critical Web service application events such as performance degradations, service level violations or availability errors to MOM. The AmberPoint Adapter for MOM 2005 recognizes these events out of the box and leverages MOM's awareness of the IT infrastructure to determine the root cause of the problem and initiate corrective actions such as clearing disk space, re-allocating database connections or rebooting a server. AmberPoint leverages the template capabilities in MOM 2005 to allow Operations staff the flexibility to customize the actions.

Alternatively, if MOM 2005 detects that a machine running a Web service has failed, it can automatically execute a command that reconfigures the appropriate AmberPoint agent to route all future requests to a machine running an alternate endpoint.

Management of SOA

AmberPoint manages service-oriented applications non-invasively: Web services code does not have to be modified or instrumented using proprietary APIs to enable monitoring and management.

AmberPoint can manage not only the Web services that an organization owns and for which it controls the source code, but also Web services that are packaged (PeopleSoft, Seibel, etc.) as well as Web services from external partners or purchased/leased Web services. Hence, AmberPoint extends Microsoft MOM's management capabilities to include federated Web service environments
Non-invasive instrumentation enables MOM operations staff to control the nature of monitoring without engaging Web service developers, thereby affording them the flexibility to modifying the type of monitoring and management with changing business requirements as well as reducing monitoring and management costs

Benefits

By implementing the AmberPoint Adapter for MOM 2005, customers of both companies can achieve the following:

End-to-end systems management: Integrated with MOM, AmberPoint delivers information on Web services systems, enabling organizations to manage the real-time conditions of their complete IT environments.
Automated Management Tasks: IT teams can automate crucial tasks across their complete IT environments.
Dynamic self-management: AmberPoint plays an active role in managing Web services systems, automatically performing actions that ensure operational health and optimize business value. AmberPoint complements MOM's event-driven management capabilities, extending self-management across the complete IT environment.
Content-based management: Because it monitors the content of Web services requests and responses, AmberPoint is able to associate business relevance with events published to MOM, allowing operations staff to determine the impact of those events.
Service-level management: AmberPoint measures both Web services performance (throughput, response times, etc.) and business value (e.g., total orders from Platinum customers). By providing finely segmented, real-time data to MOM, AmberPoint enables organizations to dynamically allocate system resources according to business priority. For example, IT staff can dedicate high-performance servers to the Web services processing the highest-revenue orders.
Optimized for .NET and Java: AmberPoint solutions are optimized for both .NET and Java platforms. Integrated with MOM, AmberPoint extends comprehensive management capabilities to Web services built on either leading platform.
Non-invasive: In contrast to other Web services management approaches, which require that management capabilities are built into the applications, AmberPoint's non-invasive solutions can be added seamlessly at any time and without additional coding to the Web services themselves.