Chapter 1. SOA Infrastructure Management: What you Need to Know

Today every organization is facing the need to predict changes in the global business environment, to rapidly respond to competitors, and to best exploit organizational assets to prepare for growth. Your enterprise application infrastructure can either help you meet these business imperatives or it can impede your ability to adapt to change.

To proactively respond to these challenges and dynamics of change, major companies worldwide are adopting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a means of delivering on these requirements. The adoption of SOA and Business Process Management (BPM) methodologies is helping them overcome the complexity of their application and IT environments, and also aligning IT and business together. SOA represents a fundamental shift in the way new applications are designed, developed, and integrated with legacy business applications, and facilitates the development of enterprise applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g is a comprehensive suite of products that includes BPEL Process Modeler, Business Rules Editor, Mediator, Web Services Manager, and Business Process Manager, all designed to help build, deploy, and manage SOA and BPM-based implementations. For the full list of Oracle SOA Suite 11g components, have a look at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E12839_01/integration.1111/e10223/01_components.htm. The deployment of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g platform within the enterprise is accelerated by the continued alignment of business and IT as a result of the rapid adoption of Service Oriented and Event Driven Architectures and Business Process Management.

While businesses strive to be more agile and dynamic, the need for administration, management, and monitoring of the underlying SOA infrastructure is essential. These are particularly important for the following reasons:

• An essential aspect of any successful SOA deployment is the ability to continuously monitor mission-critical services, business processes, events, and service levels in real time to immediately identify problems and take corrective action.

• SOA infrastructure monitoring provides visibility into the performance of each individual service transaction across distributed and heterogeneous systems. With this end-to-end visibility, problems could be spotted quickly and corrected to ensure reliable operations.

• The SOA infrastructure is also expected to enforce policies for runtime governance.

• The ability to easily and efficiently automate deployments is equally important as it enables the administrator to rapidly respond to continuous code changes.

• Proper management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is required by defining, tracking, and controlling appropriate service levels. It also provides a necessary alert mechanism in the event of an SLA violation.

In this chapter, we will provide an overview of Oracle SOA Suite 11g monitoring and management, which ultimately serves as a prelude for the remainder of this book. Here, we will introduce various topics ranging from centralized monitoring and code deployment to performance tuning and scaling the infrastructure. This book describes each of these areas and more, in varying degrees of detail, to arm you with the necessary background and understanding, as well as detailed instructions on how to perform key administrative tasks within the Oracle SOA Suite 11g product stack. In this chapter, we will introduce the following:

• Overcoming monitoring and management challenges in SOA

• Monitoring the SOA platform—centralized management and monitoring

• Oracle SOA Suite 11g Infrastructure Stack

• Performance monitoring and management

• Managing composite application lifecycles

• Cloning domains from test to production

• Introducing Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control