Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Identifying
and
overcoming
monitoring
and
management
challenges in SOA
The very nature of SOA involves implementation of services that are distributed
and loosely coupled, and thus monitoring these services is complex due to the
involvement of disparate systems that may include external systems and extern-
al resources (for example, messaging queues, databases, and so on). Tracing
transactions across a loosely coupled implementation, particularly if it involves
invocations to external systems, is extremely complicated. The reusable nature
of SOA increases the importance of managing availability and performance of
these services and greatly increases the need for closed loop governance. In
order to achieve the desired
Quality of Service (QoS)
, each service endpoint
must literally be managed like a resource. Managed services should have near
zero downtime, performance metrics, and a defined service level agreement. In
a composite service's infrastructure, it's necessary to monitor and manage the
end-to-end view of the systems, as well as provide detailed information about
the performance and availability metrics of individual services. Each part of the
overall SOA system can appear healthy while individual service transactions can
be suffering.
Another important aspect of SOA monitoring is logging. The distributed nature
of SOA makes a standardized logging approach difficult to implement. In addi-
tion to monitoring services in real time, the administrator is also required to per-
form standard administrative duties such as backups, code deployments, per-
formance tuning, purging of old data, and more. In general, SOA infrastructure
administrators are swamped with the following tasks and activities:
•
Managing multi-tier transaction flows
•
Spanning shared components/services
•
Deployed across several tiers in different containers
