Validate Functionality and Performance by Replaying
Real-World Service Interactions

SOA systems often include services that are shared across different applications and those that are outside the direct control of a project or department. As these services-based applications evolve, organizations face the issue of ensuring the performance and functionality of these changing and interdependent systems. The implications of even a minor change to a service are often not fully clear until the system is re-deployed into production.

A large part of this problem stems from the difficulty of accurately replicating the interactions of the production system. Often it is impossible to replicate external services in testing and staging environments. As a result, the QA team might have to test a service against only a single application and then just hope that all other applications will also work.

To solve these issues, we’ve leveraged our industry-leading runtime management technology to introduce the industry’s first SOA validation system.

Amberpoint SOA Validation System

AmberPoint meets the needs of QA and Operations teams, who must validate the services they’ve changed before taking them into production. It recreates the interactions of the production SOA environment by capturing requests and responses from actual usage and replaying this traffic in a staging environment.

Detailed graphs provide QA and Operations teams easy visual guides
that help them understand service functionality and performance.

Using AmberPoint, QA and Operations teams can automatically verify the performance and functionality of a changed service against applications that consume it and the services on which it is dependent. AmberPoint checks the potential impact of policy changes on services-based systems to ensure that the SOA system performs and functions as expected when taken into production.

Security Sensitive: In environments that have sensitive data—such as financial, healthcare and government institutions—the collection of production data can raise issues. To protect sensitive information in such settings, AmberPoint can mask or encrypt stored messages or individual message elements.

Dry Run Changes in Governance: Organizations making changes to policies—such as those dealing with service levels, routing or security—need to make sure these policy changes don’t break their SOA systems. AmberPoint replays messages under the new policies in the validation environment to verify that the services function as expected.

Complements Existing Testing Solutions: AmberPoint SOA Validation System complements the existing testing solutions a company might use. By supplementing messages and data generated by traditional testing tools with actual messages and data observed in production, AmberPoint enables businesses to validate their services across a broad range of applications and scenarios. A combination of using both solutions minimizes software problems, reduces downtime and ensures production-readiness.

SOA Validation Capabilities

• Validates services against entire set of dependent applications
• Uses message capture across diverse environments to create realistic "dry runs" in the staging environment
• Uses actual responses to verify functionality
• Provides validation rules to account for differences inherent in the validation environment,such as time stamps
• Provides realistic load-testing and capacity-planning scenarios that mimic actual distribution
• Verifies performance goals and new policies
• Simulates production services outside the immediate control of the project or the department