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WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA
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P/02 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY P/03 SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA P/04 SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA
WITH AUTO PILOT M6 P/07 CONCLUSION
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA
Take full control of critical transaction applications
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
What happens when important customer orders back up before the trading deadline and won’t
clear that day because of a surge of transactions caused by an unanticipated business event?
Or if an unexpected weather event suddenly drives demand for your product causing a shudder
throughout your supply chain. What about a system bottleneck that threatens to disrupt customer
service during a peak period?
Business success depends on knowing about situations like these immediately. If the applications
your business depends on run in a SOA environment, events like these require intensive situational
management.
Situational Management provides visibility into specific situations as they develop, and the ability to
proactively identify and react to a potential impact caused by particular patterns or circumstances.
It goes far beyond event-driven applications.
To effectively manage transactional performance, managers need to know about specific situa-
tions that can affect the SOA environment in as close to real time as possible. Only then can they
ensure their SOA infrastructure is ready to handle the workload, complete individual transactions,
ensure business processes flow without interruption, capitalize on fleeting opportunities, and re-
act proactively to prevent problems.
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This approach looks beyond event-driven occurrences to include a wide range of situations, such
as real-time news of events that immediately impact your business. It might be an unanticipated
a nouncement from the Federal Reserve or a surprise oil pipeline explosion half a world away—
events that can seriously impact your business but might not be readily apparent or even visible on
your management radar.
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.
Are you ready for situational management for SOA?
As companies are moving their SOA pilot projects into production they are faced with the need to
reduce the business risk. However, the basic operational management that managers relied on
with SOA pilot projects or other less critical business applications is not sufficient.
Production SOA applications that impact customers, transactions, revenue, and service levels re-
quire tighter, more immediate application-level management, what we at Nastel call situational
management for SOA.
P/02
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA
Take full control of critical transaction applications
This paper is intended for C-level executives, line of business managers, and top IT management—
people who have a direct and immediate responsibility for the success of the business and its in-
vestment in technology like SOA. In this paper, we will:
• Introduce situational management for SOA and why it is essential for the deployment of critical
production SOA-based applications
• Identify the business value and present examples to illustrate the risk and the gain
• Examine the challenges of this kind of management, which hinder organizations as they try to
move forward
Finally, we will introduce a solution from Nastel that helps organizations overcome those chal-
lenges and successfully deploy critical transaction applications under SOA.
SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA
The Challenge of Production SOA Environments
Many organizations attempt to manage their SOA environments at the underlying infrastruc-
ture or operational level. Situational management for SOA, however, raises management to the
point of managing multiple applications as they interact with each other under complex real-time
pressures.
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For this, the business needs mechanisms to quickly collect, monitor, sort, and analyze the confus-
ing proliferation of data. They must instantly recognize the transactional performance problems,
sort through complicated dependencies, and pinpoint the underlying root cause fast. In the paper
that follows, you will learn about new technology from Nastel that:
• Provides a consolidated self-contained solution that enables full situational awareness and man-
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.
agement across the entire environment from a single point of control
• Enables effective monitoring and management of complicated composite applications consisting
of myriad services and non-service-based functionality
• Collects, analyzes, and correlates a broad range of metrics, internal and external events, data,
inputs, and dependencies as the central intelligent information clearinghouse at the heart of
situational management
The bottom line: Nastel enables full control for complex SOA transaction environments and en-
sures the fastest mean time to problem prevention and resolution. It saves money by predicting
and preventing problems fast, before they impact the business, its revenue stream, its customers,
and its balance sheet.
Situational management defined
Situational management for SOA recognizes that SOA represents a complex environment consist-
ing of many parts, not all of which may even be viewed as part of the SOA that involve myriad sys-
P/03
tems, not all under the control of the organization providing the SOA environment.
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA
Take full control of critical transaction applications
Similarly, the SOA environment may be impacted by and have to respond to actions of other sys-
tems ranging from RSS feeds to network disruptions to events happening on the other side of the
world. Again, these systems and the actions that impact them may not be under the control of the
organization.
Therefore, to ensure top performance of the SOA environment and to meet service level commit-
ments, situational management for SOA identifies, monitors, analyzes, and responds to whatever
may impact the SOA infrastructure and the composite applications running over it. To do this situ-
ational management for SOA looks beyond basic operational management, beyond even event-
driven management to a broader application-level management that tries to identify and respond
to anything that can impact the application and the SOA environment.
For example:
• An equity trader involved in precisely timed trades will need to know about anything that could
potentially delay trade execution, whether network congestion or database problems or some-
thing else.
• The manager of a bank’s deposit/withdrawal system needs to know when unexpected events,
like a sudden Fed announcement, could unexpectedly spike withdrawals, which may spillover in
cascading fashion to other bank systems.
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• Commodity-based businesses need to watch weather events around the world for sudden shifts
that may impact system trading in oil, coffee, sugar, and other commodities.
In cases like these and more, the performance of and demands on the organization’s SOA environ-
ment and the composite applications it runs are impacted by actions outside the usual scope of
basic operational SOA management. Instead organizations need tools specifically to manage criti-
cal SOA-based situational transaction environments.
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.
SITUATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SOA WITH AutoPilot M6
Situational transaction environments increase the challenges and risks
The very nature of SOA environments and composite transactional applications with their
myriad pieces and multiple dependencies present several challenges that significantly raise the
business risks These risks include the failure of critical transactions, failure to meet service level
commitments, loss of revenue, and reduced customer satisfaction.
There also is the risk of missing fleeting opportunities by not being able to identify and respond to
changes quickly enough.
Key among the challenges is the need to identify problems and situations both within and outside
the SOA environment BEFORE they impact critical transactional applications.
P/04
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA
Take full control of critical transaction applications
Other challenges include:
• Speeding the resolution of problems before they impact service level agreements (SLA)
• Reducing the amount of labor and time required to monitor the SOA environment and respond
to actual or potential problems
• Monitoring situations inside and outside the immediate SOA environment, an often overlooked
challenge.
Meeting these challenges require intelligent tools that can monitor the SOA environment and
beyond, identify situations of concern, correlate information from a wide variety of systems and
sources, both internal and external, analyze the data, and issue immediate alerts as needed. The
tools need to be situation-aware, policy driven, automated, and fast.
Most of today’s SOA management tools, however, are far too labor-intensive, incomplete, and slow
to perform these tasks in a dynamic situation transaction environment running mission-critical
applications. Typically extra coding is required for dynamic situational environments, which makes
the tools too labor-intensive and unresponsive. Nastel takes a different approach.
Introducing AutoPilot M6, a situational SOA management solution
Nastel’s AutoPilot M6 Suite provides a flexible mechanism for managing the performance of com-
plex composite applications and situational SOA transaction environments. Built around a complex
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event processing (CEP) engine with integrated business activity monitoring (BAM), AutoPilot M6
enables IT to quickly identify, find, and fix problems before they impact the business.
AutoPilot M6 combines real-time rules processing with unique time-based trend recognition and
predictive problem prevention capabilities. It collects, aggregates, filters, and correlates met-
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.
rics and events from infrastructure systems with data from external sources, such as RSS and
news feeds and even email, to ensure critical composite transaction applications, such as al-
gorithmic trading for banks and brokerage firms, deliver their intended performance under all
circumstances.
P/05
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA
Take full control of critical transaction applications
Specifically, AutoPilot M6:
• Collects and correlates a wide range of metrics and events in real time
• Speeds problem resolution through real-time monitoring and analytics
• Reduces costs and generates results through real-time policy-driven automation
• Extends beyond conventional SOA and traditional backend systems to include any
information that is published and accessible
• Effectively manages J2EE application servers, messaging systems, ESBs, and databases
• Integrates with all major enterprise management systems, including IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView,
CA Unicenter, and BMC Patrol AutoPilot M6 combines CEP with application and business per-
formance monitoring to ensure top performance of situational transaction applications in SOA
environments.
Nastel Auto Pilot Suite
Business Service
Real-time Views
Views for
for Operations
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Line Of Business
External Feeds
(RSS)
Repository
Send Event
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.
Auto Pilot M6 Take
Virtual CEP Based Policy Engine Action
Send Alert
Operational Transaction Existing Application Home Grown
Metrics Metrics Monitors Metrics Tools
SOA, ESB, Applications, Middleware (JMS, WMQ, Tibco), J2EE
Auto Pilot M6 combines CEP with application and business performance monitoring
to ensure top performance of situational transaction applications in SOA environments.
P/06
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.WHITE PAPER > Situational Management for SOA
Take full control of critical transaction applications
CONCLUSION
Taking control of critical SOA transaction and composite applications
Ensuring the performance of situational transaction applications in a SOA environment poses a
difficult challenge. SOA environments are fraught with operational and business risks that extend
beyond the organization and its systems. Effectively managing a situational transaction environ-
ment for business success requires special management capabilities.
nastel.com
Nastel’s AutoPilot M6 Suite provides the kind of situational transaction management capabilities
for SOA environments that organizations need to ensure their critical applications deliver top per-
formance. It allows managers to address or avoid situations that would negatively impact critical
applications and the business itself, its customers, and, ultimately, its revenue stream. In the pro-
cess, AutoPilot M6 saves money and mitigates risk by enabling the fastest mean time to prevention
and resolution.
© 2009 Nastel Technologies, Inc.
P/07
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