Enterprise Integration Solutions

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Managing and Monitoring

Managing and monitoring an integration solution after it has been built is an

important consideration that is often overlooked. This management involves

much more than simply dealing with exceptions generated from the various

pieces of code you rely on. Monitoring in an enterprise integration context not

only means making sure that no technical or performance issues exist, it also

means answering business-related questions such as these:

■ Where is message x currently?

■ Why did system B not receive message x?

■ Where are the bottlenecks in the business process that involves sys-

tems A, B, and C?

The term for this is Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). BAM is a logical

extension of the technical monitoring level you need to keep the system

healthy. If you automate a system, the data you gather about how the underly-

ing technology performs can be used to analyze the system itself. This technical

data provides the basis for business analysis. If you track each message as it

enters and exits a piece of code and you know the function of that code, you

can transfer that data into business terms. For example, if you have a component

that provides an approval service and you know the time that each message is

sent to and returned from this component, you can determine the average time

spent approving a message. This information can be extremely useful information

to a business.

In this chapter, we will look at several techniques to examine both the

ongoing state of a solution and how that data can be used in a BAM context.