Web Services Management

Web Services Management is a natural and essential extension of existing Operational Management frameworks and solutions.  It is critical that any Web Services Management solution integrates effectively with existing solutions as well as meeting the new challenges presented by XML and Web services.

SOA Software’s Service Manager™ delivers a comprehensive operational management solution for XML and Web services.

The Service Manager Dashboard offers powerful central security policy management and monitoring capabilities.

• The Service Manager can operate as standalone software or in concert with existing management platforms
• The Service Manager creates a comprehensive SOA Fabric that delivers Quality-of-service management, though dynamic SLA-, content- and Identity-based routing
• The Service Manager has load balancing and high-availability features
• The Service Manager integrates with Tivoli, MOM, HPOV and CA Unicenter
• The Service Manager has extensive version control and change management features

There are several area that an effective Web services management platform must address:

Service Level Agreement Management – XML and Web services blur the lines between infrastructure and applications.  They have many of the qualities of the network, such as dial tone reliability and transparent performance requirements, while also providing visibility into core business functions such as transaction volume and value.  Thus, being able to define service level agreements and monitor compliance thresholds becomes an essential requirement.

Quality-of-service- The SOA Fabric must ensure the reliability, availability and performance of the services it manages.  In particular, it must be able to meet different performance and reliability objectives for different users of the same service(s).  Imagine a service that supports gold, silver and bronze user categories, the SOA Fabric must ensure that SLAs for the high priority users are met, even if it means sacrificing performance and reliability for lower priority users.

Alert Management – The Web Services Management fabric must leverage existing operational management frameworks to enable alert management.  It must also be able to create and distribute alerts when running standalone.

Visibility into the Web Services Network– As Web services networks grow in complexity, and services themselves become consumers of other Web services, the Web Services Management fabric must provide Web service network visualization tools. These tools should graphically show the virtual layout of the Web services network with comprehensive dependency tracking.

Version Control/Change Management – One of the key values of Web services is the ability to abstract applications from infrastructure services.  This is only possible if Web service consumers are able to operate independently of back-end service location and version.  The Web Services Management fabric should provide comprehensive registry and transformation capabilities to deliver this service abstraction.

Load Balancing and High-availability – Web services are quickly becoming part of the core enterprise infrastructure with all the associated performance and availability requirements.  It is essential that XML and Web services are able to scale to meet the performance needs of their consumers, and that they meet stringent availability needs.  One advantage Web services have is that their distributed nature means that with appropriate management they can easily meet these needs through load-balancing and automated failover.