Tutorials SOA DevelopmentThe first of the three M's is monitoring. Clearly, most organizations have monitoring in place. Normally, this monitoring is focused on up/down behavior. Is the solution up and running, or is something wrong that needs to be fixed? This type of monitoring is very reactionary, and solely concerned with the behavior when something goes wrong, and not at all concerned with the behavior when things are running normally. When performing service monitoring, the focus needs to shift from the internal operations of the service to an external viewpoint on the behavior of the service. What is the response time being seen by consumers? How does the response time vary during the day? How is the response time changing over a week, a month, or several months? By observing the behavior when things are working normally, a service manager can take a very proactive approach, not only to problem detection and resolution, but also to anticipating future needs.
The second M is management. Monitoring of the service is typically an activity only performed by the service provider. In order to truly be proactive, a service manager must take that information and discuss it with their service consumers. If the monitoring indicates some level of unusual behavior, be it a slow, but steady increase in response time, or anomalies in usage patterns, the service manager must discuss it with the consumers to determine the root cause. It is in these discussions that new feature requests may arise, changes being made to the existing interface in order to better support the usage patterns, or even changes being made to the consumer, based upon the observations that have been made.
The final M is marketing. Management is focused on existing consumers. Marketing is focused on new consumers. Many organizations take a "build it and they will come" approach, and all too often find out that nobody comes. While governance certainly plays a role in trying to ensure that projects find the services that they need for their solution, service providers should not rely solely on governance for finding new consumers. A service manager must take an active role in marketing the capabilities available. Back in Chapter 2, Spencer did this, albeit unsuccessfully, for the Customer Information Service. In the end, this effort paid off because Ramesh came back to Spencer when an opportunity to leverage the service presented itself again.
As these activities continue, the service manager can now begin forming plans for the next release in a proactive manner, rather than waiting to begin the cycle until the next consumer comes along and requests it. If a service manager is successful in these efforts, they can begin to plan out scheduled releases on a regular basis. This is the key to effective version management. If consumers know that a new release will be produced and deployed every six months, they can plan their own releases around that effort. If, instead, releases occur on an ad hoc basis, it is far more difficult for an existing consumer to respond to those changes.
