What is Business Monitoring?
Business monitoring consists in setting up the Web Service platform (an ESB for instance), in order to retrieve data related to the business of Web Services. If we take the example of a printer service, business monitoring will consists then in being informed about the number of remaining pages or the ink level in the printer.
Context
EasierBSM aims at retrieving information from Web Services in order to qualify them. According to the WSDM specification, this information is composed of capabilities. There are dispatched in 3 architecture levels.
- The Web Service Platform (the ESB for instance): capabilities are about messaging, addressing, security, properties and notifications.
- The Common Manageability capabilities: where information about WS-Resource (identity, availability) is provided.
- The Resource-Specific Manageability capabilities: This corresponds to business specific data related to a Web Service.
This last level is the interesting one according to this page. We propose an implementation of resource specific data retrieval in the context of an ESB.
QoS metrics
EasierBSM provides a by default Quality of Service metrics notification-based system, for each business service provided by the ESB. Here is an example of data retrieved, updated and sent to a QoS information consumer (as a Governance tool for instance):
Business data retrieval enhancement
The idea of business data retrieval for Web Services is that they expose operations easy to request since they don't have input parameter.
We take the hypothesis these operations (inklevel(), numberOfPages(), ...) correspond to the resource specific capabilities accessors.
In order to implement such a business monitoring, an additional administration service is provided by EasierBSM (at administration level), able to activate or deactivate business monitoring on a particular operation of an endpoint.
The activation will launch a separate process that will request the Web Service for this particular operation, at a frequency setted up by the administrator. The current given result will be added to the QoS metrics payload, as in the following example:
Let us notice the business monitoring can lower the efficiency of business services execution, since it takes some time to Web Services. In order no to waste to much time or memory, the request frequency can be lowered.
Business monitoring usage
As for QoS metrics, business metrics can be used at governance level, in order to help decision issues related to services (which on is the best to invoke at a given time, ...). It can be a significant enhancement for services load balancing or precise service level agreements.