SOA Management

Managing SOA services is critical to getting the full of value of SOA. To efficiently manage SOA-based applications clients need complete insight and visibility to monitor and control end-to-end implementations of SOA based services and applications. SOA management tools also need to extend and augment an IT organizations’ IT Service management efforts.

The common characteristics of SOA-based services and applications pose unique management and security considerations for IT:

 
To address these potential service management challenges and ensure the success of SOA implementations, IT needs capabilities to:

A) Manage and automate processes - for successfully deploying SOA-based services and to manage them from initial release to on-going updates and changes, IBM® Tivoli® offers automated process managers for effective and efficient execution of IT processes. These automated process managers  help ensure the integrity and service levels of existing and new applications as well as help to reduce costs and errors.

B) Manage Application Service Levels - end-to-end visibility into SOA based services and applications and their interaction with shared resources can be challenging. IBM Tivoli’s Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) for SOA provides visibility into message content, transaction workflows & flow patterns and the ability to identify and isolate performance bottlenecks across technology and platform boundaries.

In addition, to ensure that the right IT resources are deployed to serve the higher impact business services, IBM® Tivoli® Business Systems Manager provides a Services dashboard view to monitor higher value SOA services and prioritize and align IT operations to business priorities.

C) Predict and Manage Change - rapid and frequent change are inherent in a SOA environment. SOA-based applications and services share underlying IT resources. Any change made to one service or application could impact other services and applications in unforeseen and unexpected ways. IBM Tivoli’s Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) helps clients predict, control and map the business impact of any change introduced in their IT environment. The CCMDB can serve as a single version of truth to facilitate the introduction of any change in the environment so as to ensure that the existing services and applications continue to deliver to their Service Level Agreements (SLA).

D) Security Management – the very openness of an SOA can create security challenges. As SOA-based services could be deployed across organization boundaries or security domains, traditional resource-centric security is necessary but no longer adequate for dynamic SOA environments. SOA security must take a user-focused approach to securing the environment. IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager provides a solution to manage identity and access to resources across security domains. In addition, Tivoli Security Operations Manager provides a solution to actively monitor and analyze the security posture of the SOA environment.

• IBM Service Management