Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions

Chapter 11. System Management

Introduction

While developing a messaging solution is no easy task, operating such a solution in production is equally challenging: A message-based integration solution may produce, route, and transform thousands or even millions of messages in a day. We have to deal with exceptions, performance bottlenecks, and changes in the participating systems. To make things ever more challenging, components are distributed across many platforms and machines that can reside at multiple locations.

Besides the inherent complexities and scale of integrating distributed packaged and custom applications, the architectural benefits of loose coupling actually make testing and debugging a system harder. Martin Fowler refers to this ...