SOA & Web Services

More and more, mission critical enterprise applications are taking on a new form factor – the web. These applications provide internal users, and external business partners, access to a wide variety of systems which are central to the operation of the business. In their quest to provide ever more value to consumers, innovations in Web Application architectures such as Web Services and SOA are being introduced into the changing datacenter to expose legacy data and leverage existing infrastructure investments in a cost effective way. These changes add complexity and performance overhead to an already hard-to-manage environment. When one of these applications performs poorly it directly damages brand value, or revenues.

SOA and Web Services allow for increased functionality and flexibility when developing applications. Orchestrated from unassociated services loosely linked together to form an ad-hoc application or business process for the user, these applications can span many business units or IT infrastructure silos. Since services are orchestrated together in ways which cannot be predicted or easily controlled, it is difficult to estimate and plan for adequate performance in a production setting. Also, because services often rely on other services to function, applications tend to grow in complexity and leave end users exposed to the "slowest common denominator" in the application stack.

The dynamic, unpredictable and interdependent nature of SOA service requests, coupled with the virtualized environment in which it may be running, masks the source of potential problems and makes troubleshooting difficult. The reusability of SOA services creates another challenge – the potential for many single points of failure which are likely to become embedded in a large number of SOA orchestrations. Traditional Application management suites, focusing on particular application stacks, servers, silos, or synthetic transactions are ill equipped to manage the distributed, dynamic and loosely-coupled modern Web Applications being deployed in heterogeneous environments today. As typical SOA applications have potentially hundreds of "tiers," located inside the datacenter or externally hosted by 3rd party providers, previous-generation monitoring technologies are unable to tell you where or why a problem is occurring.

You need a product that is designed to manage these distributed environments, and provide you monitoring insight from the browser to the server and services participating in the response. Because these applications run in heterogeneous environments, detailed information needs to be captured whether the application runs in a physical or virtualized J2EE or .NET application server, or for services hosted by 3rd party providers.

Symphoniq's TrueView for SOA gives you unprecedented visibility into the dynamic paths which your users' transactions are taking, and helps you understand where the bottlenecks exist in every one of your SOA orchestrations, giving your IT staff visibility into the ultimate litmus test for how your SOA application are performing – the performance as experienced by the end user.

Based on the Symphoniq TRUE (The Real User Experience) platform, TrueView for SOA starts by monitoring every end user to determine the response time for their requests, as experienced in the browser. For any transaction that violates a set threshold, TrueView for SOA gathers, correlates, and presents data about every server, service, method call, and SQL query touched over the course of the transaction. This data helps your IT team rapidly identify the "slowest common denominator" in your application so that the bottleneck can be optimized out of the call stack.