Apache Web Server Journal

SOA in the Cloud

WSO2, the open source SOA company, announced the launch of the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM), which provides real-time visibility into service-oriented architecture (SOA) processes, transactions and workflows.

The WSO2 BAM system is designed to support the heterogeneous SOAs that dominate the enterprise landscape—providing a lightweight, efficient and easy-to-deploy alternative to traditionally large, complex business activity monitoring solutions.

For IT professionals, WSO2 BAM delivers near-real time access to performance metrics to manage, tune and operate a service-oriented infrastructure using both polling and eventing-based models to gather and collate information about the functioning of enterprise service buses, services and systems. For business owners and executives, WSO2 BAM delivers a business dashboard, offering insight into core business metrics. Because WSO2 BAM is highly extensible and embeddable, it can interoperate with third-party SOA middleware in addition to WSO2 products.

WSO2 BAM is being launched today in conjunction with the debut of the WSO2 Gadget Server portal, and WSO2 BAM uses the portal capabilities of the WSO2 platform to provide a highly customizable user interface. (For more detail, see today's release on the WSO2 Gadget Server). Together, the two highly complementary products complete the enterprise SOA middleware stack by providing presentation-layer solutions that give users direct visibility into the information they need from their SOAs.

Like all WSO2 SOA middleware products, WSO2 BAM and WSO2 Gadget Server are based on the WSO2 Carbon componentized SOA platform, which uses the highly regarded OSGi framework to provide a flexible, modular architecture. Both products are immediately available as downloadable open source software and as WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machines.

“SOAs have enabled enterprises to integrate legacy systems as well as new applications into cohesive workflows. However, business insight into these workflows is often limited,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder and CEO of WSO2. “With our WSO2 BAM product, IT and business users now have up-to-the-moment views across their entire infrastructure—leading to better business decisions and more effective IT management.”

WSO2 BAM Features
WSO2 BAM is designed to enable informed decisions based on real-time and historical service-interaction and mediation data. The fully open source WSO2 Business Activity Monitor is based on the proven, enterprise-class SOA functionality of WSO2 Carbon. WSO2 BAM has built-in support for monitoring the WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSO2 WSAS) and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB). Key features of WSO2 BAM are:

• Data visualization through customizable dashboards enabled by gadgets, as well as reports, provide users with a complete picture of the situations they monitor.
• Analytics help users identify patterns and trends with ease.
• Extensibility goes beyond support for third-party products to also include user-defined data collected through custom data formats.
• Key performance indicator (KPI) monitoring includes alerts whenever a deviation from a KPI occurs.
• Support for relational databases in the initial release include Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and H2.