Managed Methods (www.managedmethods.com ) introduced an agentless deployment option for gaining complete management visibility into SOA environments by passively sniffing on the network.

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Generally, in order to enable performance reporting, fault management, usage metering and SLA management in their SOA environments, companies had to either install agents on the application servers or deploy intermediaries as proxies. The agents become part of the handler chain in J2EE environments or .NET Extensions in .NET environments in order to access the message flow between the service consumers and providers. Where  the management tool is deployed as an intermediary or a gateway, messages between clients and providers are  brokered by the intermediary.

Both options have their costs. Installation of agents is usually very time consuming not only in having to install the agents but also in time required to modify configuration files on the application server hosting the Web services. There is also an increase in network traffic as the agents have to forward message data to the management server for processing. The use of gateway intermediaries often requires modification of client code to redirect the requests to the gateway. This architecture also can introduce latency into overall service performance due to the processing performed by the intermediary.

Although JaxView can be deployed either as a gateway or with agents, it now can be deployed as a network appliance to auto-discover the web services and passively capture SOAP message packets from the network. This has the least amount of network overhead, adding no latency to the message flow and adding no increase in network traffic as is the case with agent-based deployments. This option can provide visibility for both SSL and non-SSL encrypted service traffic allowing for increased deployment flexibility in secured environments. An additional advantage of this option is that it can usually be fully operational in less than a day, making JaxView a truly cost-effective choice for SOA management.

Each JaxView deployment enables visibility into the performance and operation of SOA environments including: 

Service performance metrics
Operation throughput
Fault message management
SLA management metrics
Metering
Client usage
Client access monitoring
Message auditing
Metric baselining and trend analysis. 

All JaxView deployment options provide comprehensive alerting and reporting.

Please visit us at SYS-CON Events' SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 East in New York for more info or visit our Web site to download a trial copy of JaxView at http://www.managedmethods.com