Company profile of AmberPoint from the Punetech wiki

AmberPoint is a provider of middleware for governing the runtime of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. Utilizing a policy-based approach to managing the health and well-being of SOA-based applications, AmberPoint’s software offers comprehensive capabilities for visibility into and control of loosely coupled systems.

Contents

• 1.1 Application Discovery
• 1.2 Policies
• 1.3 Monitoring
• 1.4 Exception Handling and Root Cause Analysis
• 1.5 Security
• 1.6 Testing
• 1.7 Regulatory Compliance

[edit] Main Features

[edit] Application Discovery

Automatically figure out what all SOA applications exist in an environment and determine their capabilities. Upload this information to a central repository. Keep the repository updated as applications come and go and their capabilities change. Track dependencies between various applications.

Knowing what applications are deployed, and the dependencies between them is the first step towards managing the applications properly.

[edit] Policies

Once applications have been discovered and cataloged AmberPoint allows administrators to specify policies which need to be enforced against the applications. And enforce them. Also, architects can define approved policies and make them available to their SOA developers. Developers can select the policies they need to implement and attach them to their services on the fly, without any additional coding effort.

[edit] Monitoring

Reports: Monitor the various components of the SOA in real time. Produce reports about things like: throughput, availability, response times, and errors/faults. This is achieved without requiring any modifications to existing services (no code changes), or any extra development time. And with low overhead.

Composite service monitoring: In addition to monitoring a single component, you also want to be able to monitor the same parameters for a composite service created using these components.

SLAs: The ultimate aim of this monitoring is to ensure that Service Level Agreements are being met.

Visualization: Show pretty pictures to get an idea of who is using what. And how much. And the dependencies between various components. And the flow of data.

Early warnings: Based on information about the existing SLAs and how the applications are composed of sub-components, it is possible to figure out which SLAs are likely to get violated based on the predicted trends for some of the low-level measurements taken at one or more of the components. This can help in catching problems before they become problems. Also, using the same basic information, traffic spikes can be prevented by throttling can be applied at the appropriate places at the apropriate times.

[edit] Exception Handling and Root Cause Analysis

Provide an integrated view of message flows that occur across the various components of the system. Thus allow a single interface where administrators can search for errors/issues by message type, content, client credentials, and even tie the low level messages to higher-level business transactions. This eliminates the need to manually piece together a message flow by searching multiple log files.

Also, allow for rule-based routing of exceptions to various exception handlers. It integrates with existing exception-handling resources such as in-house exception-management frameworks as well as exception-handling workflows and process-management systems.

[edit] Testing

When one component changes, it is possible that the composite service might break. And testing for this is difficult because of the distributedness and loose-coupling that is inherent in a service oriented architecture. Using AmberPoint, administrators can automatically verify the performance and functionality of a changed service against applications that consume it and the services on which it is dependent. Additionally, they can perform “what-if” runs to see the potential impact of management policies (especially security) as they change within the runtime environment. AmberPoint also allows simulation of services for testing purposes using actual production traffic and realistic performance characteristics.

[edit] Regulatory Compliance

AmberPoint provides pieces needed for complying with regulations in the financial industry, health industry, credit card industry and the SOX regulations. Examples include multi-factor authentication, role based access control, etc..

Website: http://www.amberpoint.com/

(Editor’s note: Occassionally I will be posting such quick’n’dirty profiles of Pune-based companies. These will essentially be information collected from the company website. This is not intended to be an in-depth look at the technology. It is more directed towards people how might not know about the existence of the company, or not know what it does.)