webMethods Insight

When service transactions are flowing, business is, too. Assure maximum uptime with Insight. You’ll gain powerful visibility and control to pinpoint and prevent outages. webMethods Insight is a visibility tool that shows you what’s happening in real time with service transactions as they flow across heterogeneous environments—packaged applications, legacy systems, home grown apps and databases. Use Insight with API management, SOA governance and Integration initiatives.

• Discover services, processes, patterns and dependencies
• Minimize disruptions with rapid root-cause analysis
• Monitor services performance and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Analyze service usage using technical dimensions
• Enforce governance compliance via integration with CentraSite

Insight is comprised of an Insight server, Insight agents and Insight interceptors. One server is needed to distribute policies and collect the data from each of the agents, which monitor service traffic on specific components where they are placed, and apply the policies. Interceptors, each made for a specific brand of application server, detect incoming and outgoing messages. They provide request information, for example, and the message to the agents. The agents then send the messages to the Insight server, incorporated into an overall view of the network.

Simply install Insight agents on key nodes, such as an ESB, and the software automatically discovers service transaction flows and maps dependencies. You can quickly identify problem causes and prevent service disruptions. Track down troublesome rogue services and assure every service meets governance policies to optimize performance.

View service activity as you choose—for example, by customer, channel, division and product line. This information helps you understand who is using which services, how often and in which ways.

Insight maps service transactions and captures service levels and metrics as transactions flow across applications. There is no need for custom coding or manual correlation of identifying information.

Platform and protocol support

Your services depend not only on HTTP, REST and SOAP traffic, but also on protocols such as RMI, Java^® DataBase Connectivity (JDBC^®) and XML-based protocols. Insight provides a complete view of your network, regardless of the protocols. Insight agents are available for many leading service platforms. What’s more, you can extend Insight to many other applications and protocol as needed.

One-hop-away visibility

Insight’s agent technology gives you visibility beyond the applications you manage. Use Insight on a single managed node, and you can automatically discover consumers and services one hop away.

Get alerted before a crisis. Use SLAs to monitor problems related to service performance or data issues.

Exception detection

Insight verifies that every single transaction is in compliance with defined SLAs. Use Insight to proactively detect problems that otherwise would be ignored. Insight can detect problems that even occur only sporadically.

Problem prioritization

Insight allows you to create different SLAs based on consuming applications, business division or any other criteria. This helps your staff focus on higher-priority problems.

Alerts

When an SLA is violated, Insight automatically gathers relevant information and notifies the responsible personnel through email, SNMP and custom actions. A timely alert helps you take action before employees or customers report a problem, or before the violation negatively affects business.

Reporting

Analyze activity by customer, channel, division, region and product line—or any other dimension you specify. Multidimensional analytics are available in both real-time operational views and user-configurable reports and dashboards.

webMethods Insight simplifies finding the root-cause location of SLA violations, exceptions and other service processing problems. When a violation occurs, Insight takes a snapshot of the full transaction, including the end-to-end flow, message payloads and all contextual information.

You’ll also receive a visual representation of the transaction, making it easy for you to pinpoint the source of the problem.

webMethods integration to improve transparency

webMethods Insight, Integration Server and CentraSite are fully integrated, so you can improve transparency and accountability across all stakeholders.

Rogue service detection

Take control of services that may have bypassed life-cycle policies and approvals. Insight finds rogue services and automatically places them under CentraSite control. Using CentraSite, you can ensure these services are well documented and comply with policies for service quality and performance.

Locating service consumers

Know who is calling your APIs and services and how much service capacity is being consumed by specific users. Insight uncovers which consuming applications and APIs are using what services.

It then publishes this information into CentraSite to give you an accurate picture of your API and SOA environments This enables application managers to make informed capacity and change management decisions.

Managing complex integration patterns

With an Integration Server agent, you can monitor and trace service flows through webMethods Integration Server. You’ll get detailed performance metrics that show you performance of every flow service.

Last-mile security for Mediator

webMethods Mediator makes your SOA uniform, secure and nimble by acting as an intermediary between service providers and consumers. Insight agents can detect requests that attempt to bypass webMethods Mediator and then shut them down. Use Insight to prevent unauthorized and unintended use of critical services.

Insight is designed for rapid deployments and minimal overhead, so you can effectively manage your important distributed applications.

Low latency

Insight adds less than 50 microseconds of latency to each message, offering the greatest performance of any SOA management solution. This excellent performance enables you to run the solution all the time in production, so operators can track each and every message.

Efficient utilization

Insight agents collect the full transaction history only on demand. This greatly reduces the amount of information transmitted and stored on the central Insight server.

Minimal overhead

Tests show less than two percent of CPU utilization and message throughput of more than 3.5 million messages per hour on Insight managed nodes.

Unmatched scalability

webMethods Insight uniquely blends distributed policy evaluation with centralized command and control, enabling very high scalability. A single instance of Insight management server is designed to manage at least 1,000 managed nodes and 50,000 service interdependencies.