News

Tool Helps Manage Web Services

• By Linda L. Briggs
• April 15, 2005

As companies gradually add more and more Web services to their networks, one growing challenge will be discovering, managing and troubleshooting those services.

A new release from SOA Software adds a registry-based dashboard to its Service Manager product. The dashboard uses real-time alerts and charts to help companies monitor the health and performance of their Web services.

SOA Software (formerly Digital Edition) provides management, security and governance solutions for service-oriented architectures and Web services with products such as its SOA Software Service Manager. That product helps secure, monitor and manage XML and Web services by providing centralized management of service-oriented architectures.

The new dashboard builds on Service Manager by delivering real-time information on the performance, health and availability of the Web services on a network. The dashboard displays information from service metadata managed by Service Manager’s UDDI version 3.0 registry. On the dashboard, real-time graphical displays monitor security thresholds and performance metrics.

Web services registries bring order to distributed, heterogeneous environments by supplying a single point of control for managing services and service metadata. A Web services registry is essential to any company’s SOA initiative, according to Burton Group VP and research director Anne Thomas Manes. Without proper management, adopting Web services can result in security risks, and performance and availability problems.

Products like this one will continue to add capabilities as the market for managing Web services grows, according to senior analyst Ron Schmelzer with ZapThink, an analyst firm that focuses on issues around XML, Web services and service orientation.

“The more Web services you have, the more you have to manage them,” Schmelzer says. “SOA Software [helps] companies manage the distributed set of services on the network.” The console helps manage the integrated whole, Schmelzer says, while also monitoring background activities.

SOA Software will deliver the registry-based dashboard capabilities with version 3.0 of its SOA Software Service Manager in May. Pricing for Service Manager starts at $5,000 per CPU.