In its newest release of Looking Glass, Actional Corp claims that it is taking runtime governance of web services to a higher, business process-focused level.
It’s the company’s first new product release since being acquired by Sonic Software, a unit of Progress Software Corp, late last year.
Looking Glass 6.0 adds what Actional calls business process visibility. By that it means that it can generate higher levels views of web services at run time by being able to connect the dots.
It applies auto-discovery capabilities that look, not only at whether a specific service executes, but whether there are any processes connected to it. The discovery is based on an observation of which services are triggered by which processes.
Dan Footy, CTO of Actional, says that existing runtime governance technologies may miss the forest through the trees. By tracking individual services without checking all the dependencies, they may not provide a true picture.
Footy provides the example of a customer renewing a subscription. When connecting to the subscription renewal service, the customer might receive an acknowledgement within seconds, meaning that the service met its service level guarantees. But whether the back end fulfillment system was updated might not have necessarily been tracked.
Additionally, Looking Glass 6 is providing different role-based views, including a business view that provides a BAM-like dashboard of business services; a process view providing a mid-level view of all the messages that would comprise a business process; and an IT view that shows the underlying performance of services, software, and related infrastructure.
Other enhancements include alarms that flag governance breaches, such as rogue services or service requests that are trying to bypass an XML firewall; and Trust Zones where the endpoints of various business services can be designated ahead of time as safe sources.
The new version adds support for the brunt of recent security and reliability web services standards such as WS-Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-MetaDataExchange, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-ReliableMessagingPolicy.
Looking Glass 6.0 will be available in early March.
