Root Cause Analysis

As the topology of an SOA becomes more complex, the challenge of fast, easy route cause analysis of any underlying IT infrastructure processing problems increases. Service performance and availability issues often appear in systems that may be upstream from the root cause. Full diagnostics require a roadmap of the problematic SOA transaction to address the issue and expedite problem resolution.

But in an SOA, services may be used by different processes, and those various processes execute across heterogeneous systems. There is no inherent transaction roadmap. As a result, diagnostics often take a lot of time—generating IT costs. In addition, until the problem is resolved, the affected processes lag in performance and may even be shut down, potentially alienating SOA consumers, including key customers.

Progress® Actional® for SOA Operations makes finding the root cause of exceptions, violations of business policies such as service-level agreements (SLAs), and other processing problems easy. When violations occur, along with sending an alert, Actional's Flow Mapping™ technology creates a flow map of the end-to-end problematic transaction.

This flow map shows all service dependencies and highlights the violating paths or links. SOA administrators can drill down and see processing statistics for each service—to quickly and easily trace the issue back to its source and speed problem resolution. As a result, they can keep the SOA up and running reliably, reducing management costs and maintaining the pace of business and customer service.

For additional questions on Actional solutions, please contact us.