Effective operational monitoring of online business systems involves visibility into service quality and availability. Quality of service visibility generally requires that real-user interactions with the system be monitored and metrics be derived and reported. This type of monitoring is also called passive monitoring as it only looks at real-user interactions with the system.

While real-user monitoring provides a secondary indication of service availability, a more complete assurance of availability requires actively monitoring the service and underlying infrastructure. JaxView Availability Monitoring from Managed Methods provides IT operations teams with a tool for actively monitoring Web services with synthetic requests that verify system function and uptime. JaxView Availability Monitoring enables the following capabilities:

Service End Point Availability Monitoring

JaxView helps you manage Web services availability through active testing of service end points with periodic "heartbeat" monitoring. This provides important visibility and reporting of service uptime essential for supporting service level agreements. JaxView provides a centralized management portal for:

• Viewing what services are deployed
• Viewing service uptime and response performance
• Viewing service fault messages and errors

Multi-step Transaction Availability

JaxView Availability Monitoring also includes capability for actively testing the availability and function of multi-step business processes and transactions. This supports troubleshooting of composite business transactions by correlating performance bottlenecks or faults to individual services used in multi-step transactions. JaxView's active transaction availability (heartbeat) monitoring includes:

• Monitoring generic Web service transactions with support for WS-Transaction, WS-Coordination
• Step wise monitoring of response times and errors to reveal performance bottle necks within each instance of a transaction
• Visibility into individual step fault or error information
• Report on transaction commits or rollbacks

JaxView availability monitoring can also be used by development and testing teams to verify positive and negative service function for different sets of service request criteria, different metadata, or different message schemas.

Other Management Functions

In addition, JaxView Availability Monitoring supports automated Web services management with the following functionality:

Service Performance Baselines

JaxView's monitoring baseline options can reduce event notification clutter by allowing event thresholds to be set relative to service utilization trends. Event thresholds can then be set relative to a standard deviation percentage from the baseline rather than an absolute value, resulting in fewer unintended event notifications. JaxView Enterprise includes the following baselining options:

• Rolling Baseline - Compare current performance metrics with a statistical baseline calculated for a period of hours preceding the current period.
• Weekly, Daily Baseline - Compare current performance metrics with performance baselines calculated for the same period day-over-day or week-over-week.
• Specific Date Baseline - Compare current performance metrics with the metrics from a specific date.

Flexible Alerting Options

JaxView Availability Monitoring facilitates Web service management by enabling event notification when service performance has degraded or a service end point is no longer responding. Event notification alerts are generated when a monitored event threshold has been matched or exceeded. Alerts can be sent using the following media and protocols:

• Email
• Script Execution
• SNMP
• JMS
• SOAP

Reporting Functions

JaxView improves management efficiency and visibility with reporting on performance, availability, and policy compliance in the service environment. JaxView has scheduled reports for preselected intervals and also supports on-demand reports that allow you to focus on custom time intervals. JaxView reports can be used to display:

• Performance and availability data in tabular and line chart formats
• Individual error events and events as percentage of total requests
• Fault totals for SLA reports