Japara Solutions and AmberPoint

Organizations looking to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) face a number of challenges. Due to the distributed, heterogeneous nature of these evolutionary systems, SOA's raise unprecedented management issues — requirements that must be met in order to make enterprise-class use of Web services:

• Ensuring operational health
• Insight into business transactions
• Managing across multiple machines
• Addressing heightened security concerns
• Enabling online upgrades and versioning
• Detecting and handling exceptional conditions
• Setting and maintaining appropriate service levels

Gaining visibility into and control of this de-centralized production system is critical to success with SOA.

AmberPoint addresses the complete SOA management cycle.

AmberPoint SOA Management System™ and Policy-Based Runtime Governance

With AmberPoint, enterprises implementing services-based applications can realize the full potential of their flexible, standards-based systems. They can better understand system behaviour and implement policies that automate performance management, remedy exceptional conditions and uphold security. Significantly, they can do all this without special coding to the services or message tags. AmberPoint’s non-invasive, agent-based architecture allows SOA systems to evolve and grow without constant recoding to system components.

AmberPoint SOA Management System is the industry's most comprehensive runtime governance solution. We cover its capabilities, features and benefits in the following sections:

AmberPoint SOA Validation System

AmberPoint meets the needs of QA and Operations teams, who must validate the services they’ve changed before taking them into production. It recreates the interactions of the production SOA environment by capturing requests and responses from actual usage and replaying this traffic in a staging environment.

Detailed graphs provide QA and Operations teams easy visual guides that help them understand service functionality and performance.

Using AmberPoint, QA and Operations teams can automatically verify the performance and functionality of a changed service against applications that consume it and the services on which it is dependent. AmberPoint checks the potential impact of policy changes on services-based systems to ensure that the SOA system performs and functions as expected when taken into production.

Security Sensitive: In environments that have sensitive data—such as financial, healthcare and government institutions—the collection of production data can raise issues. To protect sensitive information in such settings, AmberPoint can mask or encrypt stored messages or individual message elements.

Dry Run Changes in Governance: Organizations making changes to policies—such as those dealing with service levels, routing or security—need to make sure these policy changes don’t break their SOA systems. AmberPoint replays messages under the new policies in the validation environment to verify that the services function as expected.

Complements Existing Testing Solutions: AmberPoint SOA Validation System complements the existing testing solutions a company might use. By supplementing messages and data generated by traditional testing tools with actual messages and data observed in production, AmberPoint enables businesses to validate their services across a broad range of applications and scenarios. A combination of using both solutions minimizes software problems, reduces downtime and ensures production-readiness.

SOA VALIDATION CAPABILITIES

• Validates services against entire set of dependent applications
• Uses message capture across diverse environments to create realistic “dry runs” in the staging environment
• Uses actual responses to verify functionality
• Provides validation rules to account for differences inherent in the validation environment, such as time stamps
• Provides realistic load-testing and capacity-planning scenarios that mimic actual distribution
• Verifies performance goals and new policies
• Simulates production services outside the immediate control of the project or the department

Introducing AmberPoint Express!
AmberPoint Express is no-cost, developer's edition of AmberPoint. It enables Web service developers to incrementally measure, debug and fine-tune the performance and functionality of their Web services:

• View Web service performance in real time with easy-to-digest charts for response time, throughput and SOAP fault counts
• Gain a quick understanding of performance bottlenecks and errors from drilling down into message history or live traffic
• Comprehensive testing and diagnostic capabilities for fine-tuning Web services, including auto-generation of SOAP messages based on the Web service WSDL
• Integrated with Visual Studio .NET for point-and-click management

It’s FREE just click here!

The AmberPoint Difference
AmberPoint solutions are based on a set of principles we deem critical to managing enterprise-class SOA's.

Non-Invasive: Unlike other approaches, AmberPoint integrates seamlessly into heterogeneous, distributed environments without requiring any additional coding to the Web services or clients or mandating special headers — even when added after the fact.

Distributed: AmberPoint is a distributed solution that grows with your system. There's no central bottleneck because it's neither a hosted solution nor a monolithic platform. You can deploy AmberPoint either inside of a Web services container or set it as a proxy outside of the container.

Content-Based: In addition to monitoring system-level information ("speeds and feeds"), AmberPoint enables organizations to monitor the business content of their user interactions to understand up-to-the-minute operational status. It also makes use of contextual information, such as the user profile or access rights, creating opportunities to realize greater business value.

Observe and Participate: AmberPoint solutions both observe and participate in system use. They monitor technical and business activity and take corrective action when required — such as sending alerts or executing management actions.

.NET and Java: AmberPoint solutions are implemented natively in both .NET and J2EE, enabling them to fully leverage the capabilities and performance advantages of the leading Web services platforms.

Advanced Security Capabilities
AmberPoint products help to provide a secure environment for distributed, service-oriented applications. AmberPoint integrates with existing security infrastructure (such as Netegrity) to address requirements for authentication, authorization, integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation.

• Content-based security ensures that only authorized parties can access a service
• Compliant with WS-Security
• XML Signatures and XML Encryption
• Bi-directional, distributed enforcement with centralized control
• Leverages leading solutions for authentication, authorization, integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation

Integrates with the Enterprise
AmberPoint integrates seamlessly into any IT environment, leveraging the existing infrastructure by integrating with leading systems management solutions (such as IBM Tivoli and Microsoft Operations Manager) and security solutions (such as Netegrity or SunOne Identity Server). AmberPoint's standards-based software solutions communicate bi-directionally with any infrastructure software equipped with a Web services interface.

• Extends NSM solutions to Web services systems
• Flexible, bi-directional communication
• Shares active management with leading NSM solutions
• Event-based or log-based
• Customizable for custom event or log formats

Japara Solutions specialises in utilising and supporting AmberPoint's Products. We believe that Web Services will become an important part of integrating your business, both with your external partners and internal systems. Find Out more.

Training Available
Japara Solutions offers both foundation and advanced training courses on the full range of AmberPoint products.

Talk to us today about using these products, or how we can package a solution to your business problems.

We understand business; we understand how technologies make them work.

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