Management and monitoring phase

Operational management and resilience in the SOA is enhanced by sharing the service metadata that exists in WSRR with operational data stores. This allows management and monitoring dashboards to present a more comprehensive view of the managed service environment.

Summary information about service performance can be fed back into WSRR and used by the execution environment to affect the selection of the best-fit provider.

As in the other lifecycle phases, WSRR manages only a minimal set of service metadata and federates with repositories specializing in managing information about services in the manage phase. For example a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) such as IBM® Tivoli® Change and Configuration Management Database acquires and manages detailed information about the environment and topology in which service endpoints run. Service management products such as IBM IT Service Management suite can use and update that information and drive governance of processes that provision and configure the underlying infrastructure.

Service monitoring and management products such as IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA provide instrumentation of service interactions that allow monitoring of service interactions and service endpoint behavior; summary information about service behavior can be pushed into WSRR to populate service endpoint metadata with execution statistics and that information can in turn be used by Integration Developers or SOA run times to understand state or usage of a deployed service. In the future service management products will use WSRR managed policy information to configure policy enforcement points that implement the SLAs users want to enforce in service interactions.

In the Operator user role category:

• The incident analyst investigates unexpected incidents when they occur in the IT system and manages service endpoints. Incident analysts consult the metadata about service endpoints found in WSRR to understand the behavior of the IT systems and to assess the impact of an underlying failure; they retrieve information to augment what is known about services from monitoring their interactions and can obtain information about the lifecycle state of a deployed service.
• The Business Operations Manager analyzes performance of SOA applications from a business value perspective and uses metadata provided from WSRR to understand application semantics and to compare expected behavior to observed behavior of those applications.