SOA Success: Five Actions CIOs Say You Should Take - ' Monitor Performance '
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Action No. 4: Monitor Performance
Registries fall under the general heading of design-time governance, software and best practices that help enforce corporate design standards for services. But once services go live, organizations need to keep tabs on them. Here, services-management software plays a run-time governance role. Such products monitor the behavior of services after they are designed, tested and deployed.
Services "behave very differently" from traditional application programs, says Redshaw. "So you have to manage these in a different way," he says. Services-management tools take into account, for example, the reuse factor and the dependencies among services reuse creates. A change to one service will affect every application that makes use of it. Such products automatically discover services operating in an enterprise and their interdependencies.
MedicAlert, for instance, uses Amberpoint Inc.'s run-time governance software to monitor the performance of services. The software lets MedicAlert track performance during peak hours and makes adjustments accordingly.
Says Kevin Bohan, CIO at Garden City, N.Y.-based Proginet Corp., a maker of data integration software: "From a performance standpoint, the tools can monitor a service and ensure that it is functioning according to defined service levels. If it is not, a tool can notify administrators or change the way the service runs," he adds.
MedicAlert's Mercado says services management tools can also provide such functions as automated failover: If a service fails, a back-up service is initiated. Run-time tools are available from such vendors as Amberpoint, Infravio Inc. (acquisition by WebMethods pending), Progress Software and SOA Software. Prices generally start upwards of $50,000. But with that price comes greater visibility.
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