Viewing Discovered Services

Business Transaction Management displays information about discovered services, service endpoints, routers that distribute message traffic to endpoints, and service operations.

  • services refer to logical services

  • endpoints refer to service instances and routers

  • operations are invoked by request and response messages that one service sends to another

When you start Business Transaction Management, no services are shown. For services to be discovered:

  • Services must be deployed to application servers where observers have been installed and the appropriate probes have been activated.

  • Traffic must flow from one service to another service (unless you manually register a service).

Once services are discovered, you can access information about them from the Services To Endpoints and Services To Operations Navigator views. You can view services dependencies in the Maps > Service Map view.

Service Types

Business Transaction Management assigns a type to a service based on the type of the first endpoint discovered for the service. Service types include Web Application, Web Service, and Database. (A web application is a component that interacts with the user via HTML pages (screens)). Note that a service might have multiple endpoints of different types and be discovered by different observers. For example a web service might have multiple endpoints on different containers implemented using different technologies: JAX-RPC, JAX-WS, WCF, and so on.

Deployment Topologies and Service Information

The service information displayed varies with the topology of your deployment. If you have only one instance of a service running, one endpoint for that service is shown. If you have several instances of a service running, several endpoints are shown for that service.

There are a variety of reasons why you might discover and have to monitor several instances of a service:

  • The service is replicated for performance or failover. In this case all the replicated instances are shown as the service's endpoints. The router distributing traffic to those instances is also shown; the router name is the endpoint name with the suffix Router.

  • The service is deployed in a container with both secured (HTTPS) and unsecured (HTTP) ports. One endpoint will be shown for each port only if traffic flows to that port.

  • A WSDL includes different bindings for a service, each binding defining a different set of operations that can be implemented by different endpoints. This case is rare, but Business Transaction Management will recognize it and discover the endpoints.

How the Existence of Routers is Inferred

It might take a while to determine that a router is being used to re-direct traffic. Business Transaction Management uses the Host headers in HTTP traffic to detect when messages were originally sent to a different address than the container where they were observed, and connects the caller to the recipient in the dependency graph.

When the Host header contains a different host name but the same port, Business Transaction Management will initially add aliases for the container and its endpoints. When the Host header contains a different port than the container is actually listening on, or the same Host header is observed in traffic sent to two or more containers, Business Transaction Management infers the existence of a hardware load balancer between the caller and the service, and will add router endpoints to the sphere model as needed to connect the caller and its target endpoints in the dependency graph.

Viewing Services

You can view service using either the Services To Endpoints view or the Services to Operations view from the Navigator.

To view Services To Endpoints, select the view from the Navigator. Business Transaction Management displays information in the main area of the console. The following table describes the contents of this view.

The Services To Endpoints view is useful in that it shows endpoint replicates. Replicates are distinguished by their address, shown in the main area. They also have distinct definitional and performance information, as shown in the Tab section of this view.

Column name Description
Name The Name of the service. Expand the top logical service name to show the endpoints it contains. Expand an endpoint to view its operations.
Up/Down Arrow Green arrow specifies that the service, endpoint, or operation is running; Red arrow specifies that it's down. Yellow indicates that a service contains endpoints; some of which are running and some of which are down.
Address Address of the service's container. Replicate endpoints will have different addresses.
Type The type of the service. This is based on the type of the first service endpoint discovered.
Container type The type and version of the service container.

To view detailed information about each service, endpoint, or operation double click the desired element to display detailed information in the Tab area, which includes the following data:

Tab Description
Summary Shows a summary of performance measurements for the object selected in the main pane.
Analysis Shows performance information across a specified period of time.
Alerts Shows alerts for the selected object.
Message Log Shows available messages if message logging is enabled for a given operation.
SLA Compliance Shows the compliance of the selected object with service level agreements defined for the given object.
Profile Shows definition of selected object. You can edit some of this information by selecting Modify > Edit Profile for object name.
Dependency Shows the dependencies between the selected object and related objects.
Policies Lists the policies applied to the currently selected object.
Downtimes Specifies the scheduled downtimes for the selected object.
Properties Specifies the properties defined for the selected object. Use the Edit button to modify, duplicate, or delete these properties.

To view Services-To-Operations, select it from the Navigator. Business Transaction Management. The type of information displayed is the same as for the Services-to-Endpoints view. Tab information is also the same.