MiniGuide: End-to-end testing for SOA and enterprise transactions

I'd venture to say that the original form of middleware took the shape of a transaction monitor. As services come into greater play and distributed systems get, well, more distributed, the transaction monitor is again coming to the fore.

Now, increasingly, it is held that the best way now to understand the behavior of a complex distributed system is by ''following the transaction.'' This is apparent in a series of recent SOA news stories.

One result of Progress's 2008 purchase of MindReef was an

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

enhanced version of the Progress Actional tool set that applies Actional Flow Mapping to Application X-Ray diagnostic software to trace individual transaction flows in production. Note that early SOA governance software suites are growing to cover all types of technology types.

Read our new BPEL tutorial!
This tutorial has the expert advice, news and examples you need to succeed with BPEL.
As BPM meets SOA, testing transactions only get more complex. As a result end-to-end business process transactions are probed as part of Parasoft's recent SOA tool update. ''The challenge is that it becomes very componentized as engines like BPEL can call multiple distributed services or applications in order to complete a transaction, '' said Parasoft's Wayne Ariola. You can read more on the issue by checking out ''Parasoft SOA package addresses business process/system integration testing'' on the SOATalk blog.

With transactions, ''the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, '' reminds Ed Horst of AmberPoint. ''You have to track each transaction individually. They don't live in one spot." Read more in ''Transactions are the currency for SOA management.''

There is more. AutoPilot TransactionWorks from Nastel provides transactional discovery and operational data in one integrated set of capabilities, writes Gina Roos in a look at a new transaction offering. The software is said to reduce transactional latency and improve business transaction performance while helping users to identify and eliminate hidden costs, or "stealth waste," in their business processes, according to Roos's sources.

Roos also writes about a new application performance management (APM) offer from dynaTrace. DynaTrace's Purepath tracing technology follows and captures individual transactions down to the code level. The APM system also offloads all the data processing to dynaTrace's central server, giving customers very lightweight transaction tracking.

Services are plentiful, but non-service-oriented legacy is more so, and needs to be included in monitoring tasks. Stay tuned.

This was first published in June 2009

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.

    Disclaimer: Our Tips Exchange is a forum for you to share technical advice and expertise with your peers and to learn from other enterprise IT professionals. TechTarget provides the infrastructure to facilitate this sharing of information. However, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or validity of the material submitted. You agree that your use of the Ask The Expert services and your reliance on any questions, answers, information or other materials received through this Web site is at your own risk.

    Back to top