Through the looking glass.(Product/Service Evaluation)

It's a heady challenge for application management: How to decentralize business processes with Web services?

Difficult enough under traditional circumstances, administering applications with components that span business units or corporate boundaries is proving a stumbling block to broad, real- world adoption of Web services networks. Comprehensive monitoring and management tools for SOAs (service-oriented architectures) have been nearly nonexistent, making it tricky to rein in these interdependent software systems.

Actional is looking to bridge that gap. Its Web services management platform is made up of a centralized command post, the Looking Glass 4.0 server, and two levels of outpost monitoring, Active Agents and SOAPstation 4.0, the latter of which is an XML proxy armed to facilitate Web services management.

The Looking Glass platform sits inside your distributed Web services infrastructure. It tracks and tabulates the fault data and performance metrics reported by in-field agents to provide real-time feedback on the health and availability of your application nodes and network. Additional tools manage the application life cycle, and centralized …