WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA Published by: P/02 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY P/03 SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA P/04 SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA WITH AUTO PILOT M6 P/07 CONCLUSION

2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY What happens when important customer orders back up before the trading deadline and won t clear that day because of a surge of transactions caused by an unanticipated business event? Or if an unexpected weather event suddenly drives demand for your product causing a shudder throughout your supply chain. What about a system bottleneck that threatens to disrupt customer service during a peak period? Business success depends on knowing about situations like these immediately. If the applications your business depends on run in a SOA environment, events like these require intensive situational management. Situational Management provides visibility into specific situations as they develop, and the ability to proactively identify and react to a potential impact caused by particular patterns or circumstances. It goes far beyond event-driven applications. To effectively manage transactional performance, managers need to know about specific situations that can affect the SOA environment in as close to real time as possible. Only then can they ensure their SOA infrastructure is ready to handle the workload, complete individual transactions, ensure business processes flow without interruption, capitalize on fleeting opportunities, and react proactively to prevent problems. This approach looks beyond event-driven occurrences to include a wide range of situations, such as real-time news of events that immediately impact your business. It might be an unanticipated a nouncement from the Federal Reserve or a surprise oil pipeline explosion half a world away events that can seriously impact your business but might not be readily apparent or even visible on your management radar. Are you ready for situational management for SOA? As companies are moving their SOA pilot projects into production they are faced with the need to reduce the business risk. However, the basic operational management that managers relied on with SOA pilot projects or other less critical business applications is not sufficient. Production SOA applications that impact customers, transactions, revenue, and service levels require tighter, more immediate application-level management, what we at Nastel call situational management for SOA. nastel.com P/02

3 This paper is intended for C-level executives, line of business managers, and top IT management people who have a direct and immediate responsibility for the success of the business and its investment in technology like SOA. In this paper, we will: Introduce situational management for SOA and why it is essential for the deployment of critical production SOA-based applications Identify the business value and present examples to illustrate the risk and the gain Examine the challenges of this kind of management, which hinder organizations as they try to move forward Finally, we will introduce a solution from Nastel that helps organizations overcome those challenges and successfully deploy critical transaction applications under SOA. SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA The Challenge of Production SOA Environments Many organizations attempt to manage their SOA environments at the underlying infrastructure or operational level. Situational management for SOA, however, raises management to the point of managing multiple applications as they interact with each other under complex real-time pressures. For this, the business needs mechanisms to quickly collect, monitor, sort, and analyze the confusing proliferation of data. They must instantly recognize the transactional performance problems, sort through complicated dependencies, and pinpoint the underlying root cause fast. In the paper that follows, you will learn about new technology from Nastel that: Provides a consolidated self-contained solution that enables full situational awareness and management across the entire environment from a single point of control Enables effective monitoring and management of complicated composite applications consisting of myriad services and non-service-based functionality Collects, analyzes, and correlates a broad range of metrics, internal and external events, data, inputs, and dependencies as the central intelligent information clearinghouse at the heart of situational management The bottom line: Nastel enables full control for complex SOA transaction environments and ensures the fastest mean time to problem prevention and resolution. It saves money by predicting and preventing problems fast, before they impact the business, its revenue stream, its customers, and its balance sheet. Situational management defined Situational management for SOA recognizes that SOA represents a complex environment consisting of many parts, not all of which may even be viewed as part of the SOA that involve myriad systems, not all under the control of the organization providing the SOA environment. nastel.com P/03

4 Similarly, the SOA environment may be impacted by and have to respond to actions of other systems ranging from RSS feeds to network disruptions to events happening on the other side of the world. Again, these systems and the actions that impact them may not be under the control of the organization. Therefore, to ensure top performance of the SOA environment and to meet service level commitments, situational management for SOA identifies, monitors, analyzes, and responds to whatever may impact the SOA infrastructure and the composite applications running over it. To do this situational management for SOA looks beyond basic operational management, beyond even eventdriven management to a broader application-level management that tries to identify and respond to anything that can impact the application and the SOA environment. For example: An equity trader involved in precisely timed trades will need to know about anything that could potentially delay trade execution, whether network congestion or database problems or something else. The manager of a bank s deposit/withdrawal system needs to know when unexpected events, like a sudden Fed announcement, could unexpectedly spike withdrawals, which may spillover in cascading fashion to other bank systems. Commodity-based businesses need to watch weather events around the world for sudden shifts that may impact system trading in oil, coffee, sugar, and other commodities. In cases like these and more, the performance of and demands on the organization s SOA environment and the composite applications it runs are impacted by actions outside the usual scope of basic operational SOA management. Instead organizations need tools specifically to manage critical SOA-based situational transaction environments. SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA WITH AutoPilot M6 Situational transaction environments increase the challenges and risks The very nature of SOA environments and composite transactional applications with their myriad pieces and multiple dependencies present several challenges that significantly raise the business risks These risks include the failure of critical transactions, failure to meet service level commitments, loss of revenue, and reduced customer satisfaction. There also is the risk of missing fleeting opportunities by not being able to identify and respond to changes quickly enough. Key among the challenges is the need to identify problems and situations both within and outside the SOA environment BEFORE they impact critical transactional applications. nastel.com P/04

5 Other challenges include: Speeding the resolution of problems before they impact service level agreements (SLA) Reducing the amount of labor and time required to monitor the SOA environment and respond to actual or potential problems Monitoring situations inside and outside the immediate SOA environment, an often overlooked challenge. Meeting these challenges require intelligent tools that can monitor the SOA environment and beyond, identify situations of concern, correlate information from a wide variety of systems and sources, both internal and external, analyze the data, and issue immediate alerts as needed. The tools need to be situation-aware, policy driven, automated, and fast. Most of today s SOA management tools, however, are far too labor-intensive, incomplete, and slow to perform these tasks in a dynamic situation transaction environment running mission-critical applications. Typically extra coding is required for dynamic situational environments, which makes the tools too labor-intensive and unresponsive. Nastel takes a different approach. Introducing AutoPilot M6, a situational SOA management solution Nastel s AutoPilot M6 Suite provides a flexible mechanism for managing the performance of complex composite applications and situational SOA transaction environments. Built around a complex event processing (CEP) engine with integrated business activity monitoring (BAM), AutoPilot M6 enables IT to quickly identify, find, and fix problems before they impact the business. AutoPilot M6 combines real-time rules processing with unique time-based trend recognition and predictive problem prevention capabilities. It collects, aggregates, filters, and correlates metrics and events from infrastructure systems with data from external sources, such as RSS and news feeds and even , to ensure critical composite transaction applications, such as algorithmic trading for banks and brokerage firms, deliver their intended performance under all circumstances. nastel.com P/05

6 Specifically, AutoPilot M6: Collects and correlates a wide range of metrics and events in real time Speeds problem resolution through real-time monitoring and analytics Reduces costs and generates results through real-time policy-driven automation Extends beyond conventional SOA and traditional backend systems to include any information that is published and accessible Effectively manages J2EE application servers, messaging systems, ESBs, and databases Integrates with all major enterprise management systems, including IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, and BMC Patrol AutoPilot M6 combines CEP with application and business performance monitoring to ensure top performance of situational transaction applications in SOA environments. Nastel Auto Pilot Suite Business Service Views for Line Of Business External Feeds (RSS) Send Event Send Alert Operational Metrics Auto Pilot M6 Virtual CEP Based Policy Engine Transaction Metrics Repository Existing Monitors Application Metrics SOA, ESB, Applications, Middleware (JMS, WMQ, Tibco), J2EE Real-time Views for Operations Take Action Home Grown Tools nastel.com Auto Pilot M6 combines CEP with application and business performance monitoring to ensure top performance of situational transaction applications in SOA environments. P/06

7 CONCLUSION Taking control of critical SOA transaction and composite applications Ensuring the performance of situational transaction applications in a SOA environment poses a difficult challenge. SOA environments are fraught with operational and business risks that extend beyond the organization and its systems. Effectively managing a situational transaction environment for business success requires special management capabilities. Nastel s AutoPilot M6 Suite provides the kind of situational transaction management capabilities for SOA environments that organizations need to ensure their critical applications deliver top performance. It allows managers to address or avoid situations that would negatively impact critical applications and the business itself, its customers, and, ultimately, its revenue stream. In the process, AutoPilot M6 saves money and mitigates risk by enabling the fastest mean time to prevention and resolution. nastel.com P/07