The distributed, modular nature of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be a boon for flexibility. With SOA technology, IT teams can share reusable application components across an enterprise and assemble them in a loosely coupled way to meet changing application requirements. In the data center, however, SOA's flexibility (and all its moving parts) can raise new challenges for IT administrators trying to get a handle on application performance.

Application management vendors have been fine-tuning their products to meet the demands of SOA technology, and the latest to do so is Symphoniq, a privately held company based in Palo Alto.

Started by former NetIQ executives, Symphoniq specializes in Web application performance monitoring. To provide IT with a picture of what end-users are experiencing, its TrueView software monitors application performance from the browser to the back end. The goal is to automatically detect, diagnose and pinpoint the root cause of performance problems before they become widespread. (Compare Web Site Application and Performance Management products)

Late last month, Symphoniq unveiled TrueView for SOA, which is designed to similarly speed problem resolution with applications running in a SOA environment.

TrueView for SOA monitors from the browser through every back-end application server and service. By tagging and tracing transactions across all architecture tiers, including external cloud services, the software provides visibility into where SOA services live and how usage and performance affect the end user, Symphoniq says.

TrueView for SOA monitors real users and real transactions, and it can isolate the exact service causing a problem, says Hon Wong, CEO and cofounder of Symphoniq.

“The challenge that the SOA application architecture is facing is the issue of the lowest common denominator,” Wong says. “You’re stringing together different services that you don’t know the performance profile of; some of the services might have been provided by third party. And any application issue or performance issue within one of the services can hinder the delivery of the entire application itself. The application can only run as fast as the weakest link.”

TrueView for SOA measures the real end-user’s experience, then relates it back through track-and-trace capabilities, Wong says. Instrumentation sitting on the browser can track specific transactions through the entire infrastructure to spot that a particular server, or method call, or third-party Web service is running slow, for example, he says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.