CA dives into Web services

Earlier last month Computer Associates shipped Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management, the company’s first Web services management product.

Unicenter WSDM tracks Web applications performance and generates service-level alerts based on response times, transaction sizes, transaction volumes and system faults for internal and external Web services.

The software also provides automatic detection of problems and service failures, provides real-time alerts and has self-configuration capabilities. It also provides non-intrusive observation of Simple Object Application Protocol (SOAP) messages and provides recommendations for alert severity thresholds.

Unicenter WSDM integrates with other Unicenter infrastructure management solutions and has native support for Microsft .Net, BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere and Apache Axis environments.

This tool uses embedded instrumentation – code within application servers that monitors Web services messages and passes the data to Unicenter’s overall monitoring console. The console tracks the performance of hardware, such as servers and storage devices, and application infrastructure software.

CA also announced that a number of companies including BEA Systems, Microsoft, Sun, JBoss Group, Collaxa, DataPower and Systinet have agreed to support the product.

The identically named WSDM specification being developed by OASIS is aimed at enabling cross-vendor sharing of performance data. Monitoring functions are scheduled for release in early 2004 and CA has committed to supporting the standard.