SOA in Action Blog

I recently had the opportunity to host an ebizQ Webinar on managing SOA performance with Forrester's Randy Heffner and AmberPoint's Ed Horst.

SOA has a lot of moving parts, and digging down to spot the root cause of a service problem is not always easy. SOAs are multilayered creatures. Is it the service itself that's creating an issue? Is it the database? Is it one of the servers?

As Randy put it:

"We're talking about managing complex SOA services. So we're diving into an advanced topic that comes up as you realize how deep your service implementations can go, and as you realize some of the dependencies that happen between the various components behind the implementation of your service. Your SOA management solution however you construct it and buy it must handle SOA-based service requests that have complex service implementations."

Randy says when troubles arise with services in SOA, it's often a challenge to pinpoint the source of the troubles, and a number of teams may get involved in the process of identifying issues -- and not have the big picture. Now, Heffner says, "great, we've identified there's a problem with a service, who we going to call?" With complex SOA implementation, and multiple teams, the only answer that will be coming from everyone within their respective teams saying, "it's not me -- my stuff is working fine." That's because everyone has a view limited to their piece of the infrastructure, Randy says.

SOA management tools need to address "deep service" management, Randy pointed out. SOA management tools all do a fairly good job of altering administrators to problems with a service. Even in a complex service implementation -- it could be Java, .NET, messaging middleware, or legacy connectors -- when trouble is afoot, a good management tool will do a good job of sending an alert out.

Randy urges configuring SOA management strategies and solutions to conduct "deep service management." Typically, SOA management solutions employ solutions that don't look beyond the SOAP interface. A new generation of tools that are emerging, however, that can look beyond the service interface to the databases, services, and messaging layers beneath.

SOA management should be able to handle a variety of SOA deployments, ranging from services that invoke Java Message Service, MSMQ, Java RMKI, or CORBA, to ESBs or app servers. Many deep service SOA management approaches can start with agents that many SOA management solutions provides, Heffner said. Then, there are also an increasing number of management solutions that run natively on various platforms.

They key is to employ these solutions -- with or without agents -- to gain better visibility into the systems behind the services, he said. "SOA management solutions may have various ways to construct or correlate a picture, such as dropping tags into a message... or, you might have to do a little work in the configuration..." As services arise, problems will be better isolated, and administrators will know which team to call for assistance. Such deep service management also delivers benefits beyond root cause analysis, such as capacity management.

Randy makes the following recommendations for achieving deep service management:

"Formulate your SOA management strategies; how you're going to do successful SOA management before you start thinking about products to do SOA management.... You have to deeply know the technologies, know how complex your implementations are. Will your SOA solutions will be able to help you manage your services across the technologies? Will your SOA management solution be able to tie together the complexity and correlate the complexity?

"...Build deep SOA monitoring and management into your whole overall SOA management. It has to do with the design of your architecture, and all the elements that are part of the implementation of your services, and everything that's behind your service interfaces. Build deep service monitoring criteria into your product selection criteria as you are selecting SOA management solutions. ...Think in terms of orchestration engines, integration products, application servers, SOA applications, repository, and SOA management. Think of them and SOA management as one cohesive SOA management platform.

"So you need to understand the relationships and connections. The bottom line is to think about deep service management as you're pursing your solution."

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