white paper: soa and Web Services The Performance Paradox CA Wily Technology

Transcription

1 white paper: soa and Web s The Performance Paradox SOA and Web s The Performance Paradox august 2007 CA Wily Technology

2 Table of Contents section 1 3 Introduction section 2 4 Web s and the Problem of SOA Complexity Section 6 13 Managing Additional SOA Technologies Section 7 15 Conclusion section 3 6 Requirements for Effective Management of Web s Transaction Visibility Always-On Monitoring Production Orientation Section 4 9 Gaining Control Over Web s Environments: CA Wily Web s Manager Section 5 10 SOA Management in Action: Case Studies Problem Isolation in Full Context Transaction Mapping About CA Back Cover Copyright 2007 CA.All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

3 section 1 Introduction By simplifying communication among disparate information systems, loosely-coupled web services in Oriented Architectures (SOAs) provide the flexibility that enterprises need to adapt quickly to changing business demands. But they introduce new challenges when it comes to ensuring superior performance and availability. Many of today s heterogeneous environments are made up of both legacy applications and newer, service-based technologies. IT teams lack visibility into web services transactions as they traverse these environments, where services are often shared among several applications and failure can occur anywhere along the transaction path. This compounds the task of managing next-generation SOA-based web applications. Considering both the number of services in place and the many points at which they intersect any one of which could bring down an application how is it possible to ensure the health and availability of these services in a real-time production environment? It s no longer enough to address the performance of web services without considering their impact on the web application environment into which they are deployed. In fact, any product for managing web service-enabled applications will only be effective if it can see into the entire transaction path and into each critical intersection along the way. Enterprises must therefore adopt an end-to-end performance management approach that looks at all integration points as well as services, web applications and connected back-end systems. This paper discusses the challenges of managing complex web services-enabled application environments and is intended for IT teams faced with the challenge of maintaining a SOA production environment. It begins with a discussion of the growing complexity of today s SOAs and the requirements for effective web services management. The paper provides a detailed discussion of CA Wily Web s Manager and then offers concrete examples of how IT teams are using it in the real world to gain control over the performance and availability of web services. White paper: Soa and web services the performance paradox

4 Section 2 Web s and the Problem of SOA Complexity Today s leading organizations are implementing web services because of the many advantages the technology offers. Web services allow IT to better align with business by providing greater flexibility for optimization of the web infrastructure. Because they are scalable and can be rapidly deployed they are more resilient and better suited to dynamic, constantly changing IT environments. This allows your organization to react more quickly to changing business needs. Web services are also an excellent way to reduce the cost of enterprise integration. By creating reusable, standards-based services, web services create greater efficiencies and provide a consistent framework for assembling services. But when it comes to ensuring superior performance and availability, SOA management is challenging. IT complexity remains a huge burden for most enterprises. And while web services-enabled information systems provide many business advantages, complexity can hamper business agility. A number of factors have led to this complexity: Enterprise architectures are constantly growing in scope and function. Instead of ripping and replacing existing systems, most enterprises have grafted new capabilities onto what they already have. The resulting, heterogeneous environment made up of both legacy applications and newer, service-based technologies becomes more complex and more difficult to maintain. Shifting architectural paradigms add new layers of complexity. When outages occurred in classical client-server architectures, it was easy to pinpoint a failure, and possible sources were limited to a handful of systems. In services-enabled composite application environments, the web application server or the web server is a central point of coordination across multiple client-server systems, and a failure can occur anywhere along the transaction path. The ability to rapidly deploy new services, or versions thereof, makes it difficult to accurately map out the application architecture. Almost as soon as it s drawn, the chart is out of date. In this type of rapidly-evolving environment, how can someone troubleshooting a single transaction know which version of a service was deployed at the time of the error? Business factors, such as a change in organizational structure, a merger, or an acquisition can also increase the complexity of an enterprise architecture. Personnel that previously were experts in specific areas of enterprise functionality can find themselves working in new departments, leaving behind an institutional knowledge gap. As a result, additional application functionality tends to be glued on, making the service more complex. Soa and web services the performance paradox

5 Web services were designed, in part, to allow the systems of one company to interoperate seamlessly with those of another. Traditionally, information systems have operated independently, managing their own data while remaining blissfully unaware of other systems within the environment. The advent of web-based technology and the resultant need to share data from disparate sources led to the creation of point-to-point communication links between applications. SOA replaces hard-coded links with a loosely coupled approach but this means that from a performance management perspective, more attention must be paid to the integration points themselves. Web services performance management solutions must be able to provide visibility across the entire transaction, from initiation to completion, from the browser to back-end systems, ensuring that no problems occur along the way. Managing response time also becomes more difficult when a particular component or service is shared among several applications. Various applications have different load requirements, new applications can be deployed at any time, and the service administrator may not be alerted regarding an increase in usage. The varying application usage makes it hard to plan for and predict service load characteristics. In addition, developers of one service typically don t know much about another service, other than the information which is expressed in DL. Therefore, they usually have no means of diagnosing problems caused by a particular web service, and they may not even be able to identify which web service caused the problem. This lack of visibility is the biggest challenge with most SOA implementations and one that an effective services management product must solve. As SOA-based web application environments become more widespread, the difficulty of managing them and the need for end-to-end transaction visibility grow exponentially. The very fact that SOA makes it easier to integrate standards-based and legacy systems, whether internal or external, means that management tools must be able to reach across and within all of those systems to unearth internal relationships and dependencies. White paper: Soa and web services the performance paradox

6 Section 3 Requirements for Effective Management of Web s The first important concept to keep in mind when considering management of complex, SOA environments is that SOA itself is not another silo to be managed. SOA is a design approach to building a composite web application infrastructure and SOA technologies such as web services are deployed in a web application context. SOAs are simply the next generation of composite web applications, a more efficient way of taking data from disparate sources and linking it together to provide web-based business services to customers, partner and employees. figure a SOA represents the next generation of composite web applications. The Evolution of Composite Applications Before SOA Application Dependent Business Functions After SOA Composite Applications Scheduling Check Customer Status Determine Product Availability Ordering Processing Check Customer Status Determine Product Availability Verify Customer Credit Order Status Account Management Calculate Shipping Charge Order Status Check Credit Composite Application Composed Busn, Process Reusable Check Invoice Ordering Processing Check Customer Status Account Management Check Order Status Reusable Scheduling Reusable Reusable Reusable Check Credit Check Inventory Reusable Data Repository Marketing Sales CRM Finance Data External Warehouse Partner Marketing Sales CRM Finance Data External Warehouse Partner SOA therefore, is an evolution rather than a revolution. With composite, distributed web application environments, specific web applications are responsible for delivering critical business services, be they s Scheduling, Order Processing or Account Management (CRM). This architecture is faster and more efficient than it was 20 years ago, but it still requires the orchestration of many disparate functions into application silos. On the other hand, with a web services-based architecture, composite application environments are cleaner and more modular, further reducing inefficiencies and creating business agility. Now you have the critical business functions exposed as web services that are part of a services repository. These services can each be invoked as needed in a shared environment. Again, with web services, you now have a more flexible environment that lets you quickly and efficiently take advantage of changing business conditions. Soa and web services the performance paradox

7 Because SOA transactions traverse heterogeneous web application environments, knowing how to manage web services and other technologies within web application environments is a key capability. IT teams need the ability to open up the black box and gain visibility where there was none before, whether in web application code, connections to back end systems, web services, portlets, databases, and more. Therefore, these same teams will want to make sure that any products they consider for managing SOA technologies have proven capabilities in web application management as well as SOA management. Given the challenges discussed above, controlling the complexity of SOA and web services-based web applications requires specific management capabilities described below. Transaction Visibility Comprehensive transaction visibility is an essential requirement for managing the performance of web services. IT teams need the ability to monitor 100% of all transactions, 24x7 at the component level. Many web services transactions span multiple processes or multiple web applications instances. Therefore, it is essential that IT teams have the ability to understand each services transaction in the context of the individual transaction path. The other side of the visibility coin is root-cause analysis. Having the ability to detect incidents when they happen doesn t do your IT team a lot of good unless they can transform transaction performance data into actionable intelligence for remediating problems. Therefore, your team must be able to use information about web services transactions to isolate the root issue no matter where it arises within the application infrastructure individual problem transactions, service faults, problem components, unstable connections to back-end systems, and more. Always-On Monitoring The next step in managing web services is always-on performance and availability monitoring. IT teams must have visibility into web services performance and SLA compliance in the production environment so that issues are detected early, in real time. And with the complex nature of the service-enabled applications that enterprises deploy, discovery of the services to be monitored must be automatic, so that application support teams spend less time configuring what to monitor and more time managing the performance of services as well as the applications and back-end systems to which they connect. The ability to monitor web services 24x7 enables IT teams to then proactively take steps to detect issues, before they severely impact the business. White paper: Soa and web services the performance paradox

8 Production Orientation SOA management products are often targeted towards developers and architects. These are of course key stakeholders in any web service implementation, but they are often not the ones charged with monitoring the performance of web services-enabled applications 24x7. It s important that your team adopt a product that provides value to all stakeholders, whether they are the operations teams who must monitor performance around the clock and take quick action when issues arise, the architects who need to understand the impact of poor performance at a more structural level, or the developers who may get called in to resolve code-related problems and need immediate data from operations on the nature and likely cause of the issue. SOA management products must be able to provide live views into the services infrastructure with no additional overhead on the monitored systems. Additionally, this view must be customizable so that each stakeholder can view data in a way that is unique to their role and fosters collaboration when it comes to detecting, triaging and diagnosing incidents. Simply put, your teams must make a distinction between development tools and production performance and availability management tools. Simply put, your teams must make a distinction between development tools and production performance and availability management tools. This prevents developers from inheriting the role of production monitoring specialist and from getting called every time an incident occurs, regardless of whether the issue is code related or not. Likewise, operations teams need a tool they can use to monitor production applications and web services, quickly determine the nature of the problem and get the right people involved in remediation efforts. And lastly, a production tool that can monitor the performance of web services-enabled applications in production, around the clock and provide key data about infrastructure performance trends is an invaluable asset for the architects who must ensure web services are meeting Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) and business objectives. Related to production-orientation, the SOA management product should be a completely passive observer. The tool should be able to tell a real-time story regarding transaction processing without adding additional overhead to the monitored system, which can add latency to response times one of the very issues that you are likely trying to correct. Nor should operations personnel manage runtime policies that affect message processing and business logic in a production environment. All such policies need to be built, tested and deployed in a development or QA environment. Managing the performance and availability of your critical web services implementation is not tantamount to runtime governance. The processes and best practices you implement for detecting, triaging and diagnosing web services-related issues are separate from governance, which can best be described as a discipline that architects and developers use to create policies for services how potential services in the web application environment are identified, as well as the standards and processes used when implementing them. While important to the overall success of any SOA initiative, governance is not related to application performance management and consequently governance tools are not suitable for production monitoring and root-cause analysis of web services and SOA environments. Soa and web services the performance paradox

9 section 4 Gaining Control Over Web s Environments CA Wily Web s Manager Effective SOA performance management must support more than basic functions such as monitoring, alerting, and reporting. The management product you deploy must comprise proven technologies for monitoring web services 24x7, diagnosing issues efficiently and managing SLA compliance. CA Wily Web s Manager (M) enables consumers and producers of web services to monitor critical services around the clock, detect problems proactively, and perform root-cause analysis when issues arise. This product provides comprehensive, live views into web services, web applications and the back-end systems to which they connect. CA Wily s SOA Management capabilities help IT teams manage the complexity of SOA environments and ensure transaction integrity by delivering a deep understanding of service performance and availability why a service is slow, underlying dependencies, and how service performance affects the web applications as a whole. For example, CA Wily Web s Manager gives operations and application support teams advance notification of incidents, before end-users are affected, allowing them to effectively measure and manage SLAs. Moreover, CA Wily M delivers the detailed information architects and developers need to quickly isolate and resolve problems: views of individual transactions in which web services are involved, the number and nature of web service faults, and component interactions. figure b CA Wily Web s Manager Overview Effective management of web services requires real-time views of services performance and availability as well as proactive alerts that warn of issues before SLAs are violated. White paper: Soa and web services the performance paradox

10 When an incident occurs response time for a particular web service slows due to thread pool starvation, for example an alert notifies appropriate stakeholders of the problem before an SLA is violated or an end-user is affected. To gather information about the nature of the problem and narrow his focus, the application support manager can view detailed errors data in the context of individual transactions. Additionally, views of the slowest web services allow her to isolate the worst offenders, and socket bandwidth metrics provide crucial information about message throughput. Once the likely source of the problem has been identified, web services architects or developers can use CA Wily Web s Manager to diagnose the root cause. They can drill into web service errors to obtain critical data about the nature of the issue, including information about the SOAP message. CA Wily M also provides views of individual service and operation metrics related to response times, faults, stalled threads and concurrent invocations. Historical reporting facilitates SLA management and ongoing improvements to the web services architecture. IT teams can run SLA compliance reports on individual services and operations to ensure that service level objectives are being met and if not, to understand what failed and when. Performance, availability and usage reports for service capacity planning allow architects, developers and IT management to plan for future requirements. section 5 SOA Management in Action: Case Studies A brief examination of real-world scenarios will illustrate how IT teams are using CA Wily SOA Manager to solve management challenges. Problem Isolation in Full Context A leading North American bank was encountering serious performance problems with their web services. Customers were experiencing extensive delays when accessing their credit card accounts and paying bills online. Newly deployed web services-based applications were assumed to be the problem since performance had degraded immediately after deployment. However, the problem was difficult to isolate in a complex, composite SOA environment where failure can occur at any number of points. When problems start occurring in a production environment, IT administrators and managers need to avoid a bias that assumes that web services are the cause of the problems. Accurate problem isolation should take into account the full context of the transaction path, including not only the web service but also supporting applications, database calls and many other environmental factors. Unfortunately, the bank s traditional monitoring tools lacked the ability to monitor services transactions end-to-end, so they were unable to locate and solve the problem. 10 Soa and web services the performance paradox

11 To properly ensure transaction integrity and gain comprehensive visibility into the SOA environment, the bank acquired the CA Wily product, which allowed them to: Monitor transactions end to end in the full context of the full application Detect potential issues proactively before customers and service levels were impacted Utilize a single tool for both application monitoring and web service monitoring figure c The Managed Application Envionment When troubleshooting performance issues in web services-enabled environments, IT teams must have visibility into the entire transaction path. Identity Manager SAP PSFT Siebel Network Router Firewall Switch Load Balancer Web Servers Portal Applications Mainframe Database End User Web s Databases 3 rd Party Applications As it happened, the performance problem was indeed caused by other factors (in this case, MQ and database calls) instead of the web services applications. The application support team was able to quickly isolate the cause and notify the right system administrator to get the problem fixed quickly. White paper: Soa and web services the performance paradox 11

12 Transaction Mapping A major financial services provider had become an early-stage adopter of web services, using a SOA-based solution to deliver online services to millions of customers worldwide. A SOA design had been created to facilitate a three-tier architecture allowing transactions to flow from presentation layer to normalization services to back-end systems. However, the IT organization needed to gradually roll out this infrastructure; a wholesale deployment would have compromised the integrity of their customer-facing applications. As the deployment unfolded, they needed an accurate, real-time picture into transactions to get a perspective on active components deployed to the web services supply chain. Web-service development practices were also a problem. Getting the right level of granularity around service operations requires architectural expertise and a deep understanding of the interface use cases. Being new to web service development, with the first couple of development attempts web service interfaces tended to be too granular, requiring several requests and responses just to complete a single transaction. The increased number of requests and responses resulted in greater overhead and network latency. IT required an understanding of the complete path for a single transaction: the long leg of the call stack and the number of times backend resources were invoked. The developers also often used service connections that their colleagues had already implemented, or just used connections that they knew would work. Sometimes, the developers bypassed the interface altogether and simply executed a direct API call for the service. These practices created a spaghetti of unplanned, ad hoc connections among nodes, further limiting the ability to properly manage transactions. figure d By executing direct API calls rather than the web services interface, the development team created a spaghetti of unplanned connections that complicated management efforts. The Unplanned Spaghetti Effect Presentation Layer Normalization Normalization Normalization Backend System Backend System Backend Backend Backend Backend System System System System 12 Soa and web services the performance paradox

13 To address these problems, IT made the decision to use CA Wily s end-to-end performance management product for web services that allowed them to: Better understand how messages flow through the entire system, end to end Assess the impact to web services when performance issues occurred Gauge network latency Support strategic, web-services development based on granular performance data With this product in place, they were able to see live transactions down to the component level in the context of the transaction path. The application support team was then able to work with the development team to ensure all transactions were meeting service level objectives and to develop processes for ensuring superior application performance throughout each stage of the web application lifecycle. section 6 Managing Additional SOA Technologies CA Wily Technology also offers performance management products for other key SOA technologies. Message Broker A message broker is a communication layer responsible for guaranteed message delivery. It is used to decouple applications from each other. Examples include WebSphere MQ Series, JMS, Sonic MQ and TIBCO Rendezvous. In SOAs, the message broker acts as the channel over which services can publish messages to a list of subscribers, thereby enabling loose orchestration of the services. CA Wily Introscope PowerPack for IBM WebSphere MQ Connectors and Messaging System allows application support personnel to monitor WebSphere MQ Java connectors as well critical activity inside the MQ messaging system itself including queue depth, channel metrics and message rate. It measures web applications use of the messaging system and correlates application performance with that of the messaging infrastructure. With this product, IT personnel responsible for ensuring web application performance can identify the cause of problems within the messaging infrastructure and provide MQ administrators with specific information about the nature of performance problems. Introscope can also monitor JMS, as well as solutions from Tibco and Sonic. Integration Broker Historically, integration brokers have provided a wide range of functionality that encompasses message brokering, back-end connectivity (via adapters), and process orchestration. Integration brokers continue to offer the vital service of process orchestration. By coordinating and managing transactions across services, developers have the ability to rapidly construct services-enabled applications that mirror established business processes. Integration brokers provide business process orchestration, engaging message brokers where asynchronous interactions are required. CA Wily Introscope White paper: Soa and web services the performance paradox 13

14 and Introscope PowerPacks provide performance management for leading integration broker solutions such as IBM WebSphere Business Integration, BEA WebLogic Integration as well as integration solutions from TIBCO and Vitria. Introscope offers deep, component-level visibility into these environments, allowing IT personnel to detect problems end-to-end, and to isolate the root cause of performance issues whether in the integration broker, connected business application adapters (for example, adapters for mysap, Siebel, etc.), or in the web application itself. Enterprise Bus (ESB) ESBs inject dynamism into an SOA. Acting as an intermediary among various service consumers and providers, ESBs provide authentication, transformation, and routing services that can be configured and deployed at runtime. They coordinate communication between IT resources, including applications, services, information, and platforms. CA Wily Introscope can be customized to monitor ESBs by incorporating metricbased management technologies such as Java Management extensions (JMX). Portal Server Enterprise IT teams are increasingly recognizing portal servers as an integral component of an SOA environment. Portal servers provide a presentation framework that traditionally has acted as a web service consumer. However, with the introduction and adoption of RP, portals have begun to act as services providers as well. CA Wily Portal Manager is the only product built specifically for ensuring the superior performance of enterprise portal solutions such as IBM WebSphere Portal, BEA WebLogic Portal and SAP Enterprise Portal. CA Wily Portal Manager delivers 24x7 monitoring of the entire portal framework including individual portlets (as well as RPs) and workflow processes to give a comprehensive, real-time view of portal performance. It also provides visibility into connected back-end systems so that performance issues can be identified and eliminated throughout the portal environment. 14 Soa and web services the performance paradox

15 section 7 Conclusion Loosely-coupled service environments provide unique benefits to the organizations that utilize them but they introduce new challenges. IT teams responsible for ensuring service performance and availability currently do not have the comprehensive visibility they need to detect performance issues before SLAs are violated, to determine the exact nature of errors as they occur, and to resolve problems quickly, regardless of whether they are caused by a service, application code or connections to supporting systems. As the real-world examples in this paper illustrate, ensuring the superior performance of services enabled environments requires: End-to-end response-time monitoring of web-based transactions; A deep understanding of service performance (why a service isn t performing and how poor service affects an application); The ability to view down to the individual transaction level of a web application and its associated services; Capabilities for ensuring SLA compliance via real-time 24x7 visibility into performance and proactive notification that can provide advance warning of a slowdown or outage. Only when these requirements are met can IT teams operations, application support, architects and developers fully gain control over complex, composite applications upon which so much of their business depends. White paper: Soa and web services the performance paradox 15

16 CA, one of the world s largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT for greater business results. Our vision, tools and expertise help customers manage risk, improve service, manage costs and align their IT investments with their business needs. CA Wily Technology is the market-leading provider of Enterprise Application Management solutions. By delivering end-to-end visibility into customer transactions in real time, products from CA Wily Technology enable companies to successfully manage the health and availability of their critical Web applications and infrastructure. CA s collaborative management approach allows enterprises to rapidly detect and diagnose application slowdowns and failures, and better assess the impact of application performance on business success. This means better customer service, more stable revenue streams, and higher IT productivity. 0807