An open source monitoring framework for enterprise SOA

Abstract

Web services monitoring is currently emerging as an effective way to trace faults in services at runtime. The lack of testing information provided by web services specifications was an indication that other methods need to be used to assess the quality of web services. This is mainly due to the fact that it is difficult to simulate the client infrastructure during testing of web services. Monitoring consists of inspecting services at runtime and taking adequate actions when unacceptable events occur. Monitoring could be performed by different stakeholders and could target different properties of services. Predominantly, monitoring is performed by service providers to manage their internal resources and balance their requests load. In our effort to improve the monitoring infrastructures, we propose a monitoring framework in which all the participants (services providers, services requestors) can contribute to monitoring and at the same time have direct access to the monitoring data. This paper describes a monitoring framework developed as part of NEXOF-RA1 project. The framework offers a set of capabilities for a collaborative monitoring of web services. The paper presents motivations, system design, implementation and usage of the framework.