As more and more IT shops deploy multitier middleware platforms and frameworks for the delivery of business-critical application services, they are expecting to garner the benefits of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) or composite application development approach: agility, flexibility, productivity, and extensibility. Typically, these benefits are delivered to application developers by the framework vendors, using proprietary or standards-based protocols. This flexibility for users usually results in complex multitier environments, and the responsibility of managing this complexity has been assumed by developers and IT staff.
Composite Application
Management: Bridging the
IT Visibility Gap in Complex
Composite Applications An Oracle White Paper November 2008
Composite Application Management: Bridging the IT Visibility Gap in Complex Composite Applications
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 3 A History of Application Performance Management.................................. 5 A New Application Landscape........................................................................ 6 The Need for Composite Application Management.................................... 8 Oracle Composite Application Monitor and Modeler............................... 11 Conclusion........................................................................................................ 13
Composite Application Management: Bridging the IT Visibility Gap in Complex Composite Applications Page 2 Composite Application Management: Bridging the IT Visibility Gap in Complex Composite Applications
INTRODUCTION As more and more IT shops deploy multitier middleware platforms and frameworks for the delivery of business-critical application services, they are expecting to garner the benefits of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) or composite application development approach: agility, flexibility, productivity, and extensibility. Typically, these benefits are delivered to application developers by the framework vendors, using proprietary or standards-based protocols. This flexibility for users usually results in complex multitier environments, and the responsibility of managing this complexity has been assumed by developers and IT staff.
Figure 1: Expected benefits of a composite application or service-oriented application approach
Composite Application Management: Bridging the IT Visibility Gap in Complex Composite Applications Page 3 Implementing composite applications or SOA is expected to align IT with the Although a traditional APM solution business and quickly adjust to change as competitive pressures arise, as illustrated in generally enables an IT organization to pull metrics on the underlying code supporting Figure 1. However, the legacy application management products currently an enterprise application, it typically supporting these critical applications are increasingly keeping these organizations doesn't allow the IT organization to set a from achieving these benefits. With the broad acceptance of Simple Object Access performance metric on that particular Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST), composite application service or business function applications are further extended, especially because they allow the application logic and then provide correlation down to the to be further subdivided or delivered by external environments. code components supporting that service. Traditional application performance management (APM) products provide deep visibility into the performance of an enterprise application's code components, but these tools fail to correlate the code and code component performance with the performance of the application services delivered by these complex composite applications. For example, an application implemented with a portal framework on top of an application server delivers specific application services to end users, who are represented on the portal pages by tab and page flow combinations. Although a traditional APM solution generally enables an IT organization to pull metrics on the underlying code supporting an enterprise application, it typically doesn't allow the IT organization to set a performance metric on that particular application service or business function, such as the account balance query, and then provide correlation down to the code components supporting that service. In n-tier composite applications, this correlation from the application services to the code would provide IT organizations the ability to both diagnose and optimize the performance of their applications on a service-by-service basis. This is critical, because one application service on a particular portal page may be performing fine while another application service may be underperforming, yet they are leveraging shared application components. The composite applications of the early part of this decade leveraged a relatively simple and static architecture, generally a d... [download for more]
