News

CA tool monitors Microsoft MapPoint

• By Rich Seeley
• December 10, 2003

Performance monitoring for Microsoft's MapPoint Web services is an early application of Computer Associates' (CA's) Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) product announced this week.

MapPoint was a beta site for WSDM (pronounced 'wisdom') and provided an early test of CA's Unicenter version that extends to granular monitoring of Web services, right down to inspecting SOAP messages for flaws, according to Marc Camm, CA's director of business development.

As Unicenter WSDM becomes generally available this week, Camm said Microsoft plans to use the CA monitoring tool to get visibility into MapPoint's 15 million daily transactions. Considered one of the most heavily used Web services currently available, according to Camm, Microsoft's geographic business mapping applications were the ideal place to beta test WSDM.

''A service like MapPoint is predicated on 99.8% up time,'' he said, ''and having granular visibility into the actual transactions and the different APIs inside of their system gives them the ability to offer a higher level of service.''

Microsoft network administrators had monitoring tools for areas such as CPU usage and server performance, he said, but WSDM gave them the ability to look into the Web services transactions and spot performance problems at the SOAP level.

''An example would be if their Web service is taking an incredible amount of time for one transaction,'' Camm explained. ''We give them the ability to log the SOAP traffic. They can then look at the specific SOAP request that's creating that performance degradation and understand within the scope of their enterprise and the way their system works, why that particular transaction is creating a problem. Or we can capture the SOAP information that is causing the generation of different SOAP faults and causing it not to process. Now they can look at their availability and performance correlated against the different transactions at that point in time to drill down into the root cause.''

He said Unicenter WSDM also provides data on Web services transactions that can be downloaded into OLAP tools for business and performance analysis.