The creation and adoption of "standards" help to bring about interoperability. Within the management area, the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) specification, currently being developed within OASIS, is an attempt to bring about interoperability for the management of distributed computing environments. It essentially defines a protocol for interoperability of management information and capabilities via web services. This article provides you with a few thoughts on how WSDM could be applied in practice, and why this particular initiative is so important in aligning IT and business.

Before looking into the utilization of WSDM, let's first quickly examine why the standard is being created. After all, there are standards currently in place for management, such as SNMP, JMX and WMI, to name a few. However, while these standards are effective in managing specific resources within the enterprise, they do not address the management of business processes and the underlying application services they rely on. There is no standard available for expressing the relationships that exist between resources, business processes, and related services. And there is a significant gap for management standards to provide a means to correlate business and IT. The WSDM Technical Committee within OASIS is attempting to address some of these issues.

So what exactly is WSDM? In short, the WSDM specification will define WSDL for exposing management information and capabilities. It defines a standard for the management of Web services, as well as defines a standard for management using Web services. Considering the fact that WSDM utilizes Web services to expose management information, applications within the management domain gain all the benefits associated with this type of loosely coupled distributed paradigm in the same way that business applications have. For example, firewall traversal via HTTP for inter-enterprise communication, as well as platform and container neutrality.

The WSDM specification will provide a direct means for applying interfaces to management information across the entire technical stack within the enterprise, which provides a unique opportunity for utilizing this management information in alternate ways. There is no doubt that management information will still be utilized concretely to manage status such as service levels and availability. However, if business metrics are also available, there is an opportunity to correlate the two.

Let's walk through a simple example. Suppose a furniture manufacturer offers a guarantee to deliver a product within 30 days of an order being placed. If the order is not shipped within 30 days, a 10% discount will be applied to the order. The manufacturer has several shippers to choose from, and selects one based on cost and delivery time frames. All shippers the manufacturer conducts business with have implemented the WSDM standard in order to expose information about their services in order to provide enhanced customer service.

The manufacturer utilizes a business process for orders based on the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard. WSDM can be used to monitor the end-to-end response time of a BPEL process as well as the time taken by each step. The manufacturer uses this to monitor the 30-day guarantee pledged to customers. In addition, the manufacturer also listens for WSDM based notifications from its shipper to gain insight into their ability to ship on time. These notifications could be based on IT or business events.

As the manufacturer receives WSDM events from suppliers, the information can be correlated with the order process to judge whether the 30-day time period of an order, now ready for shipment, would be in jeopardy by using a particular shipper. Let's suppose that the primary shipper's tracking system has malfunctioned and has effected the ability to guarantee delivery by a certain date. This IT event is sent to the manufacturer who in turn uses an alternate shipper. This comes at an increased cost, but allows the manufacturer to fulfill the customer guarantee. Once the primary shipper returns to a state supporting the manufacturers business objectives, an additional WSDM event can be sent allowing the manufacturer to resume normal operation.

While WSDM defines how we can expose management information in a standards based way, it will formulate the basis for interoperability of management information. In the example above, you can see that WSDM can be used to monitor a business process and correlate that process with an IT event. Using WSDM for these types of correlations will formulate the basis for organizations to align IT and business bringing the enterprise to a new level of efficiency.

About the Author
As senior software engineer/architect for Hewlett-Packard's OpenView Division, Jeffrey Tuck works closely with developers and development teams to communicate emerging technologies being developed in the area of Web Services Management. Prior to joining Hewlett-Packard, Jeffrey was development manager for Bluestone Software, Inc. jtuck@hp.com