Posts tagged as:

business process management

The State of SOA Monitoring and Management?

by doug on August 7, 2008

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?

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!

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In Search of a Unified “B” Story and Solution

by doug on April 10, 2008

“B” is our middle name. We have “B” scattered throughout everything that we do. At times we fight over who owns the “B” word. I’m in search of a unified “B” story and solution. IMO, if we had this, it’d be tough to compete with us in any of the “B” acronyms.

The “B” Business TLA’s: Business Service Management (BSM), Business Process Management (BPM), Business Performance Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Business Transaction Management (BTM), Business Intelligence (BI) and I’m sure there are others.

What’s it going to take to have a unified “B” story and solution? Sure, we’ve probably got mentions in individual roadmaps and presentations of how we’ll integrate with this, share data what that, use Cognos here or there, send events from one tool to the other, etc. but what about a real “B” solution? IMO, these approaches just prolong client value and significantly delay any real innovation in core products.

What’s the cost of “forking” and creating a new solution entirely? One that focuses on becoming best of class in all of the “B” areas (ok, at least do all of them pretty darn good)? One that can be implemented and managed by one team free from (well, probably not) the organizational politics that’d exist if it was a “solution by integration” solution. One that has the best possible chance of truly aligning business and IT. Ok, this is probably cost prohibitive, but its GOT TO BE THE END GOAL!

This is where the politics come in unfortunately…where would you start? Which “B” is the most important “B”? Is it Business Service Management – my preference is here of course. Our friends in other organizations would see it other ways for sure. We must find the right way to develop the “B” story and solutions in ways that are most beneficial to the client. We must include content in each others products that “treads” on each others turf. We must have joint releases that build towards the unified “B” story and solution. When we release a new business process management suite (BPMS) we must include dashboards, models and integrations that provide value OUT OF THE BOX inside our BSM product. This must be backed up with the business and services consultants who have consultative based skills to guide our clients through the process because this isn’t about the product as much as it is about working through the organizational problems and politics.

A unified “B” story and solution may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s what clients really want to strive towards and our competitors are making giant strides in this direction. What would your ideal “B” solution look like? If you were king for a day …

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