Visibility in both SSL and Non-SSL SOAP traffic

Obviously as we mentioned in the below discussion it is imperative to have visibility into web service communication. This visibility is important for creating SLA's and managing performance and faults generated in the runtime environment.

There is also a need to find out on a per client basis how the Web service is performing and the passive monitoring of the service environment needs to be for every client accessing the service.

Now lets assume that the SOA environment includes an XML gateway where the requests from the actual clients are sent using SSL to this gateway. The gateway then in turn will decrypt the message and forward the decrypted message to the server hosting the service. The service will process the SOAP message and sends a clear text SOAP response to the gateway which encrypts that message and send the response encypted to the client that initiated the conversation.

So most soa management products can give you visibility to the communication between the XML gateway and the Web service. But what about understanding what is happening from the client to the XML gateway. To do that you would need visibility into SSL traffic.

Getting visibility into the SSL communication will allow you to build your SLA's around the actual client accessing the service and will include any perfromance degredation that the XML gateway will introduce into the communication. It will also allow you to correlate between the SSL and non-SSL portion of the communication. It allows you to also audit those messages and be able to use that information for SLA enforcement.

You can read about how JaxView provides agentless visibility into SSL traffic please read here.


AA

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