What is SOA Management?

As we sift through the hype of SOA this question comes to mind. How do I effectively manage my SOA. I would have to say the most effective way to manage an SOA infrastructure is to manage it without having to disrupt the SOA.

There are more than a few SOA management vendors out there but for the most part deployment of a SOA management solution is both cumbersome and expensive. The cost of this deployment is more than the cost of the product license. Some of these products are so complicated that there is a need for a resource just to manage the SOA management product. That is a ridiculous notion in my opinion.

Most of these products require an agent to be installed on all the application servers or gateways to be able to provide visibility. Again that's a hidden cost of these products that usually is overseen. Managing the agents and deploying the agents is both time consuming, disruptive and intrusive.

With these agents installed you could then get visibility into different protocols such SOAP, REST, JMS, JDBC, RMI etc. But the over head the agent adds to the server its installed on and the time to configure all the agents etc is too much for many companies that they just go about their SOA without a management tool.

A better way to go about SOA management is to manage the SOA environment without the use of any agents by monitoring at the network layer instead of the server. Many network monitoring tools use this architecture to monitor tcp/udp packets. Why not use the same mechanism to monitor other protocols that are used within the SOA. Well that is exactly how the agentless deployment from JaxView monitors the SOA.

Don't get me wrong there are cases where you need to have an agent or there is a need for a proxy for other enforcement of policies such as authentication and authorization but in general an agentless approach has much less overhead than any other approach. Here are some reasones why agentless approach is more efficient.

• Platform Independent - Obviously since nothing is installed on the server there is no dependance on what platform the server is installed on
• No change to Provider or Consumer - Again since this is managing and providing SOA visibility by monitoring out of band traffic there is no change that occurs to either the consumer or the provider. You can actually move intor production within minutues instead of days or weeks
• No Load - No Latancy - Since the monitoring is done on the network and only out of band traffic this adds virtualy zero latency or load to the system as a whole
• All Protocols - By dissecting all tcp protocols this deployment can provide visiblity into SOAP, REST, JMS, JDBC, RMI etc.
• Service Discovery - This is the best way to autodiscover rogue services in the SOA environment. If a service is being published and someone is trying to access it then this will discover it. In agent based solution they will only be discovered if there is an agent on the server the service resides on.

You can read more about this deployment at one of our customer sites in the case study here.

AA