The monitoring of a service architecture: Amberpoint

The spreading of Service Oriented Architectures increases the need to implement the effective monitoring of such architectures. Among the specific monitoring tools for distributed architectures based on the use of heterogeneous Web Services, Cluster Reply, in partnership with Amberpoint, proposes a Web Service management and monitoring solution based on a centralized tool gathering and viewing information concerning the availability and use of Web Services.

The Amberpoint architecture is based on a central component – the sphere – through which agents distributed on each server offering Web Services may communicate. Agents notify the sphere real-time information concerning the availability, use and response time of the managed services.

The main functions of the Amberpoint solution are the following:

• Individual services availability monitoring
• Service response time monitoring and alerting thresholds management
• Collection of data concerning the use of a Web Service
• Development of a Web Service dependency graph
• Monitoring of availability and response time of composite transactions made up by multiple Web Services
• Logging  and Tracing
• Balancing of Web Services provided by many Application Servers
• Security and authorization policy management
• Discovering of Web Services within the business network