Runtime Monitoring of SOA Applications: Importance, Implementations and Challenges

This paper presents the usages, current status and challenges that face monitoring real runtime SOA applications from both research and industry points of view. SOA application monitoring can be done for collecting statistics, guaranteeing quality of service, generating test cases or other purposes. The key challenges that face SOA monitoring are (1) monitoring overhead and performance degradation, (2) the diversity of supported formats and protocols, which is further complicated by the growth in the number of integrated applications that requires complex logic to be able to monitor individual paths across multiple services, and (3) the distribution of services which is further complicated by deployment in the cloud. We cover academic perspectives that are typically proposals for models or architectures for SOA middleware for monitoring. And we cover as well real monitoring techniques supported in SOA frameworks provided by software vendors.