| Discovery and management
Many paths lead to service-orientation, yet they have but one destination—aligning IT with business. Along this path, business requirements—and the risks associated with them—are transferred to IT. It is challenging enough to manage applications within organizational "silos." As new IT initiatives dissolve these boundaries, it’s easy to see how the risk of application failures and issues such as performance degradation can grow exponentially, with increasingly direct impact on the business. 24x7 production environments demand comprehensive system-wide tracking and operational visibility to minimize failures and downtime.
At the same time, the IT infrastructure becomes increasingly subject to the regulatory compliance guidelines that govern business processes—from HIPAA, to Sarbanes-Oxley, to PCI/DSS. The traditional tradeoff between security and flexibility can introduce challenges that may thwart an organization’s efforts to move to open and distributed IT architecture.
Before they can realize the business value of SOA, organizations require management and security capabilities that are beyond the scope of traditional solutions.
DISCOVERING AND MANAGING APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES
To help organizations maintain awareness of services in the runtime environment, AmberPoint automatically discovers the deployed application components, as well as the dependencies among those components. It bootstraps governance processes by automatically publishing this information to registries or repositories, while periodically updating these stores to keep the data up to date. It provides an informative view of the service network and its dynamic relationships to help organizations manage the complex dependencies inherent to loosely-coupled business systems.
AmberPoint’s runtime blueprint enables architects and managers to ensure that only approved application components are deployed within their environments. It also helps them to weed-out "rogue" services and brings these unapproved components into the fold by submitting them to the appropriate governance processes. Runtime dependency information is particularly useful for service impact analysis.
OPTIMIZING RUNTIME PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY
AmberPoint brings predictability, visibility and control to service-oriented applications by delivering comprehensive service level management for services, transactions and business processes across heterogeneous environments.
Users can set different SLAs for discrete business segments and prioritize service use by any business criteria—such as focusing on most valuable users (customers, partners, etc.) or providing the best Quality of Service (QoS) during peak hours. SLAs can be set and monitored for individual services as well as composites such as processes and transactions.
Knowing who's using what is also a critical aspect of understanding and controlling these systems. That's why AmberPoint records and archives service performance as well as usage for historical analysis. AmberPoint supports detailed usage analysis over time to help identify trends and revenue opportunities.
AmberPoint prevents service problems by providing early warnings, facilitating impact analysis and initiating timely response. It has the unique capability of preventing traffic spikes and overloads from impacting the system by selectively throttling traffic before peak capacity is reached. This service throttling feature is particularly valuable in protecting new SOA investments—such as SOA-enabled mainframe systems—from unexpected demand. Throttling may also be used to prioritize delivery of services based on business criteria.
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