Whether you work for a very large company with thousands of services in production or a small company with only a couple, visibility into the performance and uptime of those services is critical. Before you start investigating the myriad of governance products on the market, many of which will set you back a great deal of money, let me save you some time (and money). You can get up and running in about an hour for chump change with JaxView from Managed Methods and get a firm handle on how your services are performing (or not performing as the case may be). If you’ve ever worked with SiteScope for website monitoring, you’ll recognize the quick time-to-value paradigm of JaxView and for good reason – it is brought to you by some of the same people who built SiteScope. You’re going to love JaxView’s intuitive user interface and different deployment options, including an agentless option, which will get you started in a flash. Here’s what you can expect from JaxView for your modest time and money investment:

• Excellent visibility into client-service interactions
• Monitoring service quality, performance, and usage
• Heartbeat monitoring of services a la SiteScope
• Web services security policy administration and enforcement
• Enforcing automated governance policies in runtime
• Mediation and routing
• Integration with UDDI registries, ESBs, directory services, and databases
• An agentless deployment that is easy to get up and running and manage
• An appliance option that you can truly just plug in to evaluate

JaxView Basics
JaxView requires Windows (XP Pro, 2000 Pro, or 2000 Server), Linux, or Mac OS X. A database is not necessarily required as the file system is used by default to persist monitoring data for 30 days. In case you are monitoring high-volume services, or you need to persist data for more than 30 days or use JaxView’s clustering option, a database is required. Supported databases are MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2. On Windows the JaxView server installs as a service and is immediately ready to use as a service proxy gateway. JaxView also has deployment models including an agent-based network sniffer and an ESB connection via JMS. In each of these cases, the central JaxView server receives and persists monitoring data. The management console is hosted on the same server and, once you log in, you see the interface depicted in Figure 1. Web services under management appears in the left pane and can be grouped into folders for convenience. The main frame of the “Services” tab gives you a simple view of the performance and operability (errors, alerts, and faults) for the level of the web services hierarchy (all, folder, or individual service) view that you choose in the left navigation pane. Figure 2 is a summary report of how a service operation is performing. The left nav view is similar to an organizational hierarchy view that would be found in a service registry/repository and, in fact, JaxView has deep and wide integration with UDDI registries – it will gather service and policy metadata from the registry via the UDDI inquiry API as well as update service metadata via the UDDI publication API. Endpoint proxy URLs are automatically published to the service registry once you manage them with the JaxView service gateway, which causes your service consumers to begin using the managed endpoint URL.