A business centric end-to-end monitoring approach for 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 composite business applications. In this paper we present an initial prototype of our business centric monitoring approach using monitor sets for monitoring a simple loan application composite implemented on IBM's WebSphere Business Modeler, Process Server and Business Monitor. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the convenience, effectiveness and 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. Our work also exposes potential challenges as we extend this work to support more powerful end-to-end monitoring. © 2010 IEEE.