SOA Management - the right strategy and tools for an optimized management of your SOA landscape with SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1
By Elena Doll, SAP NetWeaver Product Management - SOA Middleware
Business processes running in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) are composed out of multiple services. An end-to-end SOA Management is required to ensure availability, reliability and high performance of business processes. It should guarantee an efficient management of individual services without interrupting the business process flow.
SOA Management therefore is not just about monitoring or retroactive analysis; it is about end-to-end management. It provides a set of tools to configure, manage and optimize SOA based systems, applications and processes even in complex heterogeneous landscapes. SOA Management offers runtime & design time governance, lifecycle management (of services) and security of the landscape.
SAP NetWeaver SOA Middleware consists of Process Integration 7.1 (PI 7.1) and Composition Environment 7.1 (CE 7.1). PI 7.1 service enables your systems and integrates heterogeneous landscapes. The Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) available with PI 7.1 and with CE 7.1 provides optimized tools for designing, composing and managing services, processes and applications. The Registry enables search and consumption of certain services. In addition to PI 7.1, CE 7.1 and ESR capabilities, SAP offers tools like Business Rules Management (BRM) and Business Process Management (BPM) to define and manage the business rules and processes.
The ESR within PI 7.1 provides Design time governance. It offers the storage for services based on open standards as well as tools for creating services, designing business process models and pre-built end-to-end processes exposed as standard business level web services. It includes business semantics as well as global data types. It also gives a foundation for runtime management and safeguarding business process integrity.
To help customers build their SOA landscape, SAP offers the SAP NetWeaver as a unified platform. SAP NetWeaver as standard-based SOA platform is open to add non-SAP sources and offers the flexibility to create, adapt and run end-to-end SAP and non-SAP related business processes.
For runtime governance, SAP offers within PI 7.1 the SAP NetWeaver Administrator (SAP NWA). This tool provides a single entry point to configure, administer, and monitor your whole SOA systems, its components, and the applications running on top of them. SAP NWA is a web-based tool that does not need to be locally installed and offers an easy-to-use and task-oriented interface. SOA Management provides various tasks in the area of configuration, administration and monitoring as related to messaging involving various scenarios: Configure provider service destinations, registry and profiles, perform mass configurations and Web services configurations, analyze logs of Web services and monitor various components in Process Integration.
The following are the main functionalities available in SAP NetWeaver Administrator for SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 Monitoring tasks: Message monitoring, Performance monitoring, Cache monitoring, Alert inbox/rules, End-to-end monitoring, Adapter monitoring, Communication channel monitoring (Adapter Engine), Sequence monitoring and Web service logging and tracing.