A business centric monitoring approach for heterogeneous service composites

Abstract

Enterprise applications today are composed of multiple independently executing services and processes that collectively provide a solution to a business problem. These composite applications contain a heterogeneous collection of services that execute in a variety of runtimes making them difficult to manage while maintaining a business centric point of view, as opposed to a service point of view. This paper introduces a business centric monitoring framework to bridge the gap between the business and service levels in complex business applications. Our technical approach focuses on using business information invariants to define one or more monitor sets in order to relate service activity to business composite execution. We apply this framework to enable end-to-end monitoring of heterogeneous composite business applications. In this paper we present a prototype of our business centric monitoring approach using monitor sets for monitoring an order management composite implemented on IBM's WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) v7 and tested on WebSphere Business Monitor v7. This extends our earlier work on demonstrating end-to-end monitoring of BPEL service composites in WebSphere Business Modeler v7. The new contribution of this work is (1)a prototype implementation of our monitoring approach on a different IBM product, WID v7, which supports heterogeneous service composites, and (2) demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach with respect to a (new) heterogeneous order management scenario. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the ease of design and deployment of our monitoring solution to attain a single end-to-end business centric view of a collection of heterogeneous services executing together. © 2011 IEEE.