No matter how well an SOA application has been tested and coded, it's bound to produce unexpected faults and errors. Not even the smallest distributed applications and integrations are exempt. Early detection is the key, yet SOA transactions spanning multiple systems and services might "disappear" beyond a certain point in their flows. If such unexpected conditions aren't detected proactively and diagnosed in a timely fashion, they can impact business. Shopping carts might lose their contents, orders may be lost, and packages may be rendered untraceable.

Application support teams must debug such issues and resolve them as quickly as possible. They are required to minimize the time it takes to repair such issues, often measured as Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).

However, with layers of components coupled together, it becomes extremely difficult to track the business flowing through an SOA system. That's because pieces of information are scattered across multiple log files, across multiple servers and across potentially different geographical locations. Debugging errors in production environments becomes a laborious and disruptive exercise.

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 will no longer suffice.

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

Business Process and Transaction Tracking

AmberPoint tracks individual messages SOA-wide and automatically correlates them into their respective transaction or process flows. This unique vantage point creates 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 tracks transactions across a wide range of SOA interactions, including those facilitated by SOAP and XML Web services, 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.

Exception Detection and Root-cause Analysis

AmberPoint also provides sophisticated instrumentation to detect various types of unexpected conditions, either business or technical in nature. Application support personnel can search transactions based on message content, time of arrival, message type, or client credentials to narrow-down the root cause. They can then examine individual messages or correlated flows to understand the complete context. With many other built-in tools to facilitate root-cause analysis--such as the ability to compare messages, replay transactions and submit test messages--AmberPoint slashes the time it takes to diagnose runtime issues from hours to minutes.

Automated Exception Response

AmberPoint automates exception handling to suit any variety of needs. It enables rule-based routing of exceptions to various exception handlers. It integrates with existing exception-handling resources such as in-house exception-management frameworks as well as exception-handling workflows and process-management systems.