Selecting SOA Management Tool
Posted by Animesh Ghosh, Technical Architect
SOA is a set of Policies, Practices and Architectural patterns; it is not Technology, Product or Standard. These set of Policies, Practices and Architectural patterns must be a part of Governance which is a decision and accountability framework. Governance does not prescribe how to manage an organization on a daily basis. However, it provides a collection of solutions and policies coupled with a method that encourages desirable strategic behavior.
It has never been too early or too late for an organization to start SOA Governance, as soon an organization starts its SOA journey, it must be accompanied by a proper Governance mechanism. This journey could be well supported if there is a proper SOA Management and Monitoring infrastructure in place.
The key aspect of SOA is to make business functionality available through a set of well governed, standards based, loosely coupled services and processes, defined in a flexible and agile manner. To successfully achieve this, SOA must be done under proper SOA governance with associated tools in place
Why SOA Management and Monitoring Tool?
When an organization progresses with its SOA initiatives it recognizes the challenges that come with the benefits that a successful SOA implementation offers. The Organization realizes that it will need a special set of IT Governance which is SOA Governance. Conventional governance and management does not work because loosely coupled services and their interactions require enforcement of metadata and policy that current tools do not provide. Some of the service-based applications are distributed across different organisations which work in co-operation to perform a certain task.
In SOA, an organization is tasked with understanding and controlling a live, dynamic network of interdependent services, one that evolves quickly and includes application components beyond the control of the IT staff of a particular organisation. Governing this de-centralized production system is critical to success with SOA and requires a specialised tool. A SOA Management and Monitoring Tool can provide an insight view of the SOA service infrastructure to the Business and IT team, giving more relevant information for decision making and accordingly the team can manipulate the services.
Figure 1 below shows how a tool becomes an integral part of an organisation’s SOA journey.
Figure 1
How to select a SOA Management and Monitoring Tool?
One of the main aspects of a successful SOA is the careful implementation of a SOA Management and Monitoring infrastructure. As SOA Governance is about decision and accountability framework, while selecting a tool we need to understand how well a particular tool might fit into the existing framework and help to manage and monitor SOA infrastructure. SOA is an incremental process. ‘Big Bang’ approach really does not work here. An organization needs to select a tool that can support it at any level of SOA maturity and during the transition to the next level.
The ultimate aim here is to satisfy customer’s needs and business is the main customers over here. A tool must provide a meaningful business view from where an non-IT (i.e. business) will be able to get what he needs to make business decision which is directly linked to organizational Goal and Strategy.
- Policy-based approach (Business)
- Service network monitoring (Technology)
- Service and infrastructure discovery (Technology)
- Service level management (Business)
- Exception management (Business)
- Policy enforcement (Business)
Figure 2 below summarises what to consider while selection a SOA Management and Monitoring tool.
Figure 2
Tools from each of the vendor are good in certain angle but deciding the right tool for an organization requires careful consideration of the needs and the relative strengths of each product. There are several tools from the major vendors and here is what my personal view about them.
o HP OpenView can provide end-to-end monitoring capability for virtually every kind of application in this world. HP Systinet focuses on comprehensive SOA Governance and Management. You got to use them together.
o IBM Tivoli Composite Application Management for SOA emphasizes core web services management and integration with the Tivoli Monitoring framework. This tool is matured enough to count on.
o The only tool focusing extensively on organizational governance aspects. AmberPoint focuses on managing the runtime aspects of SOA Applications and helps to manage performance with service-level objectives.
o Actional focuses more on service monitoring and it provides a comprehensive end-to-end view of activity and performance of executing processes.
o Oracle is a leader in Forrester's SOA Lifecycle Management Wave, via acquisition of BEA, providing comprehensive support for governing the entire SOA ecosystem and out-of-the-box support for capturing and measuring your SOA investment.
