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S N E A K P R E V I E W

Sift Shows Potential

August 7, 2003
By Lori MacVittie

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With the continued growth of Web services comes the need for management tools capable of disseminating XML and SOAP to provide an accurate view of service performance. Although most Web monitoring tools can provide some statistics based on the SOAP endpoint (or URI), Web services-specific management tools must provide in-depth stats on the performance and use of operations provided by endpoints. To understand the patterns of use and performance of Web services, this distinction is a necessity.

Service Integrity's Sift 1.5 provides such monitoring for Microsoft .Net Web services. It comprises a server-side component--a set of .Net Web services--and a console app that can be deployed on any machine running Windows 2000 SP3 or XP SP1.

Prerequisite software is easily obtained and installed through handy links provided in Sift's installation document. For my tests, the target server had .Net redistributable 1.0 and .Net Framework SP2, so all that was required was a quick download and installation of the .NET J# redistributable (required because Sift's server-side components were developed in J#).

Once Sift was installed, I was prompted to log in. Normally, I wouldn't mention such a mundane step, but this is one area where Sift needs some work. There is no administration required for users because there is no user administration.

While Sift takes advantage of integrated windows authentication through IIS in regard to access to Web services, this does not apply to users of the Sift console. Service Integrity is aware of this issue and is working on a more integrated solution for user administration.

Good

• In-depth monitoring of .Net Web services
• Real-time dashboard and alerts
• Centralized console

Bad

• Impossible to modify some configuration aspects after installation
• .Net-only (a J2EE version is in the works)
• Lacks user management and authentication required to create new user

Sift, $2,000 per CPU. Service Integrity, (617) 965-0281. www.serviceintegrity.com

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It's a breeze to add a host and discover services on that host automatically, provided the services are only one directory deep in the server hierarchy. Services can be added manually, but the autodiscovery feature makes the addition of numerous services simple. After the services have been added, Sift begins logging access to each service and subordinate operation, making the data available for viewing in the dashboard, reports and alert generation.

The dashboard provides an almost real-time display of server and service metrics from a multitude of views. Although the physical layout of the dashboard is not configurable, you can add multiple individual panels, each configured with a metric-appropriate graphical chart.

I added graphs detailing server performance, access counts per service and response times per service.

Test Driving Sift

I fired up ApacheBench and sent requests to a service being monitoring by Sift. The panels in the dashboard run about one to two minutes behind in display of data, but the eye-candy helps to discern at a glance the state of your .Net Web services. It was easy to see the difference between the two Web services I'd coded up and deployed in terms of response time and usage.

Reports come in three distinct metric categories to view: performance, traffic, and usage of services and operations. Reports reside on the dashboard and let you segment real-time displays and reports into separate categories.

Lori MacVittie is a Network Computing technology editor working in our Green Bay, Wis., labs. Write to her at lmacvittie@nwc.com.

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