What’s the state of operationalizing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) monitoring and management tools? Are the typical network, systems, enterprise operations/management centers (NOC/SOC/EOC/EMC) up to speed on how to manage, monitor, triage, troubleshoot and in general understand how SOA is being used in companies that are adopting it? Should the operations center care that they have an event from something related to SOA infrastructure and respond differently than they would for a non-SOA event? Have SOA events, incidents, problems, process and workflow been thoroughly implemented in such a way that “it just works” like traditional enterprise monitoring and management? Or, are these fancy SOA monitoring and management solutions really reserved for those applications experts responsible for complex application support and development?

If a client continues to struggle with fundamental e2e service monitoring and management, transaction monitoring and management or even batch job monitoring and management, what will their chances of success be for SOA monitoring and management? Could SOA and associated “service or transaction oriented monitoring” be a catalyst to shore up these other areas? Should one be tackled/improved before starting on another? At a minimum, instituting a “service oriented” organizational structure and mentality is certainly something I’d recommend for anyone adopting broad based SOA principles.

Eric Roch offers some solid advice on SOA Monitoring and Management which highlights that there’s more need for doing the fundamentals of systems, application and service management and monitoring really well as a foundation for SOA Monitoring and Management.

Others (and my preferred focus area) feel that monitoring SOA should really be more closely related to monitoring what this SOA initiative and deployment’s all about - the business. Business Service Management (BSM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM) all play a key role in helping understand how IT infrastructure, systems, applications, etc. support and impact the business’s goals and objectives. The fairly new buzzword Business Transaction Management (BTM) spearheaded by Correlsense and OpTier really speaks to the desired need here.

I feel that it’s got to be a focus on both of these areas, but with a strong preference to the “B” buzzword set since most IT organizations are likely using the “improve/standardize/reuse/efficiency/time-to-market” spin to aide in business support and justification for their SOA initiatives. That said, you’d BETTER focus on the things that the business cares about and show them tangible evidence that your SOA initiative is making things better for them. This is very possible by adopting a BSM, BAM, BPM, BTM (or a preferred combination) strategy that focuses on providing the right level of business visibility into the SOA environment and more importantly the e2e business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities. It ultimately all ties back to the service level agreements delivered to the business anyway right?

What’s on the market these days for SOA Monitoring and Management? Should you get your monitoring and management tooling from your core SOA platform vendor or should you take a third party, “best of breed” approach? Are there true “vendor neutral” solutions out there? Are clients implementing SOA architectures based on multiple vendor’s technology, solutions and products?

• Progress/Actional
• Amberpoint
• Avicode
• CA Wily
• Correlsense
• HP
• IBM Tivoli ITCAM for SOA
• Manged Methods JaxView Suite
• MuleSource Galaxy and HQ
• Nastel Autopilot
• OpTier
• Oracle/BEA
• Progress (Actional, Sonic, Mindreef)
• SOA Software
• Symphoniq
• Tidal Software
• Truviso

Some additional content on some of these vendor solutions is available here.

Who might the “market leader” be of these SOA specific solutions? What makes them a leader? What capabilities, features, functions would be considered “best of breed”, differentiator, must have, core, desired, nice to have, etc.?

What’s “really” needed for SOA monitoring and management?

1. Web Services
2. ESB
3. Transaction Performance
4. Transaction Availability
5. Transaction State/Status
6. SOA Registry
7. SOA Security
8. Service Discovery and Relationship/Dependency Mapping
9. Transaction Discovery and Mapping

Anything else missing here? What here needs to be specialized in its own product versus just extending the investments clients have already made?

Please do share your thoughts here. There are folks lurking who really need help in figuring this stuff out and/or improving products and capabilities on the market today!

Links that I have found interesting for August 6th:

• Juniper Gains Network Management Support - The goal is to not only speed up integration into existing network platforms, but to enhance operational efficiency and speed up the deployment of applications and services across the network.
• runbookautomationsolutions.com - innovative approach transforms runbook entries from reference guides into actionable tools that run diagnostic tests and find problem fixes.
• Turn to collaborative tools for systems performance management - IT mgmt vendors and projects are increasingly adding in collaborative IT mgmt functionality, or are planning to in the short-term. Rarely do I speak with a vendor who doesn't have collaborative IT mgmt functionality on their road-map for the near future.
• TrustSaaS uptime monitoring, alerting and reporting for SaaS (eg Google Apps, Salesforce) - TrustSaas.com is an uptime monitoring and alerting service ('SaaS Weather Report') for Software as a Service (SaaS) run by an independent third party.
• Intalio/BPMS 5.2 Introduces Key BPM Features for Enterprise Customers - MarketWatch - Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides corporations with a unified view of their business through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), dashboards, and reports.

  ** OSS version gives BAM for FREE! **

• BMCDN : BMC Service Impact & Event Management - Service Impact & Event Management technical documentation, marketing collateral, and training material
• BMCDN : BMC Analytics for Business Service Management 2.0 User's Guide - document explains the predefined reports that are shipped with the BMC Analytics for Business Service Management (BMC Analytics for BSM). It also describes how to create custom reports and view and modify existing reports.
• BMCDN : BMC Analytics and BMC Dashboards for BSM Developer Guides - Technical documents that provide information of value to BSM Dashboards & Analytics developers and users, including, but not limited to, developer guides, user guides, and installation and configuration guides
• BMCDN : Enterprise Integration Engine: What Is It ? How Do You Use It? - step by step guide to creating an integration between a discovery application and BMC Atrium CMDB. Anyone planning to use EIE as the method to integrate discovered data to BMC Atrium CDMB should review this presentation.
• BMCDN : BMC Atrium CMDB Common Data Model 2.1 - Visio - This Visio file is a companion file for use with the BMC Atrium CMDB Common Data Model PDF file. With this Visio file developers can use Microsoft Visio to track modifications and extensions made to the data model in their implementation.
• BMCDN : BMC Atrium CMDB Common Data Model 2.0 - Version 2.0 of the Common Data Model (CDM)
• BMCDN : BMC Atrium CMDB Developer Guides - Technical documents that provide information of value to BMC Atrium CMDB Data Management developers and users, including, but not limited to, developer guides, user guides, and installation and configuration guides
• BMCDN : Remedy ITSM 7 Operational Categorizations: a New Paradigm - This document attempts to help customers struggling with translating the CTI values from ITSM version 6 or lower (specifically Incident Management) into the Operational Categorization values in ITSM 7
• BMCDN : Service Request Management 2.0 Benchmark Report - BMC Software, Inc. conducted a benchmark test to measure the performance and scalability of the SRM 2.0 application in an environment running BMC Remedy AR System server 7.0.01 and Oracle database 10.2.0.1 for Solaris 10 on Sun Fire series.
• BMCDN : BMC Remedy IT Service Management 7.0 Installation Guide - The BMC Remedy IT Service Management 7.0 Installation Guide describes how to install the five BMC Remedy IT Service Management applications.
• BMCDN : BMC Remedy IT Service Management 7.0 Configuration Guide - The BMC Remedy 7.0 Configuration Guide describes how to configure the applications that make up the BMC Remedy IT Service Management suite of applications, with the exception of BMC® Service Level Management.
• BMC again… | Martin Kuppinger - And, in any case: Define your BSM strategy as a BSM strategy (and not a CMDB or ITIL or ITSM or Service Desk strategy) … Than you can decide on which products from which vendor you should use.