Market Bulletin, June 2004
As applications become more loosely coupled management systems will need to support business functions that span multiple enterprises. These will comprise interrelated elements that may need to work collaboratively over days or weeks to transact a single business function.
Often these elements will have only a “virtualized” existence that has no static one-toone mapping with specific underlying host servers; for such environments classically implemented concepts of enterprise management will be increasingly less appropriate. Management platforms can no longer rely on being able to place agents on every component in a system and the act of monitoring an application can no longer solely rely on the instantaneous aggregation of alerts at a console.
Web services environments offer significant business benefits for organizations of all sizes through their flexibility and inherent connectivity. However, the very distributed and dynamic nature of a Web services environment requires advanced management capabilities to maximize business value. Management solutions for
Microsoft® .NET-based Web services are available today both from Microsoft and partner ISVs. These solutions are significantly enhanced with the release of
Microsoft Operations Manager 2004 next summer, which will include a core set of components for Web services mangement in its standard featureset. In the future, with the upcoming Windows® operating system code named “Longhorn”, and new releases of Visual Studio
® .NET, the management of Web services becomes intrinsic to the application itself. Using these technologies, complemented by
System Center, Microsoft’s new enterprise management solution, business applications will, for the first time, take an active role in their own management, using Web services and business process-based orchestration to extend management across multiple hetrogeneous peer enterprises.
Microsoft provides basic Web services management today through the capabilities found in Microsoft Operations Manager
2000 (MOM), Windows Server
™ 2003 and the management instrumentation accessible via Visual Studio .NET. Windows
Server 2003 delivers a best-of-breed, highly manageable environment through its investments in such technologies as MOM
Management Packs (MP), .NET Framework support, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and improved commandline tools. Web services that are built on Windows and .NET infrastructure benefit from system-provided instrumentation that is inherently exposed through Windows and the .NET Framework, providing rich indicators of the health of the key elements of Web services.
In addition to its own development efforts Microsoft is working closely with a number of companies to ensure best-of-breed management of .NET Web services environments in heterogeneous environments. Three companies are providing early leadership in this regard, developing MOM extensions specifically oriented toward Web services, integrating their deep understanding of the Web services stack into the current version of MOM 2000.

Actional: The Actional Web Services Management Platform provides end-to-end visibility of service network interdependencies and integrates this information into the central MOM console.

Amberpoint: The Amberpoint Management Foundation delivers a heterogeneous view of end-to-end Web services and integrates this information into the central MOM console.

CA: Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (Unicenter WSDM) provides native in-stream .Net and J2EE Web services management. Integrated with MOM, Unicenter WSDM delivers a high level of visibility and control for the Web services layer in the enterprise.
By providing a high level of integration between traditional management tools such as MOM and specialized Web services management tools, customers are able to bring together the management processes required to operate today’s systems.
These systems, providing critical business functions, comprise traditionally tightly coupled applications working alongside more loosely coupled Web services.
The practical approach to managing heterogeneous environments comprising traditional and new technologies is not to attempt to create a single framework that does everything, rather it is to ensure appropriate levels of management

information can flow easily between different manager components. In this regard Web services and business process orchestration will play an increasingly important role to play in providing management functions.
While Web services management standards are in their infancy today, Microsoft is committed to the use and integration of management using Web services. An early example of this is the new MOM connector framework for MOM 2000 available later this year. A Web service itself, the connector framework will allow full bidirectional synchronzation of alerts and alert clear-downs between MOM and any 3rd party management platform. As other vendors follow this lead and expose management platform functions through Web services such integration will become increasingly simple to implement allowing customers to adapt their management solutions to meet the changing support needs as business applications evolve.
Microsoft Operations Manager 2004 delivers dramatic improvements in ease of deployment and use. This will make MOM
2005 attractive to the broadest range of customers. With MOM 2005 the time it takes to deploy MOM is reduced to just a few hours while the operational efficiency of many aspects of MOM has been increased through the provision of new tools to help track and resolve problems more easily.
In addition to improved deployment and ease of use, the third core area of investment for MOM 2005 is providing next generation knowledge. Management Packs are MOM’s mechanism for delivering knowledge of an application or system so that an IT administrator can quickly get to the root of a problem, or stop it from occurring before it starts. Many Management
Packs are already available for the currently shipping version of MOM, MOM 2000. These provide deep insight and expertise into the operational health and performance of the Windows Server operating system, services such as Active
Directory ® and the .NET Framework, and a range of Microsoft and third party applications including Microsoft server applications such as Exchange, SQL Server
™ and others. Management Packs include application specific information about alerts, associated knowledge base articles, extended views and reporting. In MOM 2005, Management Pack knowedge extends to support state monitoring, topological views, custom tasks and advanced reporting functions. MOM 2005 will also offer a broad range of new Management Packs for Microsoft server applications with still more third party Management
Packs available from partners.
Managing Web services introduces a new set of requirements: it is necessary to provide knowledge that goes beyond a single application or system; Web services exist across many systems and applications. MOM 2005 introduces a series of new Management Packs oriented to Web services and designed to manage the key elements of the Web services stack.
This approach to managing Web services observes and monitors the constituent parts of the service wherever they may reside. This results in MOM 2005 delivering a practical solution to Web services management to provide operational health and performance monitoring of business critical Web-services based applications, complemented by a range of integrated third party solutions as required and as appropriate. These complementary solutions will extend the Web services management capabilities of MOM through heterogeneous connectors to manage other environments, including J2EE. They can also add deep understanding of transactional components of Web services, and application specific understanding of particular Web services. Microsoft will work closely with partners to develop extending technologies through the new SDK facilities available with MOM 2005.
Even without value-add extension, MOM 2005 provides a full solution. In its standard configuration, MOM 2005 includes the following new Management Packs for each element of the Web services stack, together with a new Management Pack specifically designed to monitor the availability of the ‘virtualized’ Web services hosted by the underlying systems.

Windows Server 2003 Management Packs: Any Web service built on Windows Server 2003 will benefit from the detailed knowledge contained in the 10 different Windows Server Management Packs. This knowledge spans the core system, Active Directory, networking and other infrastructure components that most Web services exploit. Simply building on this infrastructure will ensure that Web services are manageable through MOM. While MOM 2000 offers great management of the operating system, a series of new Management Packs will be made available with MOM 2005, including new Management Pack functionality for state monitoring, topological views, tasks and advanced reporting.

Internet Information Service: Web services that build on Internet Information Service (IIS) are ensured that knowledge

of the base IIS functions are available to the administrator through the IIS Management Pack. This is in addition to the knowledge provided by Management Packs for the rest of the operating system. This pack contains over 500 rules that are designed to surface alerts for issues which require immediate attention from administrators in order to quickly resolve problems.

ASP.NET: Any .NET-based Web service will rely heavily on the capabilities of ASP.NET, and will benefit from the wellmanaged nature of ASP.NET environments. Specific understanding of ASP.NET is included in the .NET Framework
Management Pack. This Management Pack contains over 50 ASP.NET rules that can help ensure the availability and health of the ASP.NET infrastructure as well as the applications that run on top of it. Additionally, ASP.NET application developers and IT professionals will benefit from a rich set of sample and template rules that can be customized to monitor specific ASP.NET applications, reducing the time to develop and test Management Packs for custom managed code applications to just a few hours.

UDDI: UDDI provides a mechanism for discovery of Web services and other programmatic resources. As such it is a critical component that must be managed in order to ensure the overall health of a Web services infrastructure. With
MOM 2005, Microsoft will introduce a new UDDI Management Pack that will monitor the availability and health of the
UDDI service.

SQL Server: The Management Pack available for SQL Server 2000 already include over 500 rules that provide information to administrators. With the introduction of the “Yukon” version of SQL Server, Web services will be able to rely on aneven more sophisticated database. In conjunction with the release of Yukon, Microsoft will be releasing an all new SQL Server Management Pack specifically designed for this release.

Web Services Application-specific Knowledge: Even with deep knowledge about all elements of the Web services stack provided through Management Packs, there is often a need for application vendors or in-house developers to provide information on the application-specific components of the Web service. An application vendor or developer can easily create a new Management Pack using the tools provided in the MOM SDK, enabling MOM to evaluate, respond to, and collect and monitor application-specific information. In addition to the MOM SDK, sample and template rules for managing Web services can be acquired from the .NET Framework Management Pack. These rules can be copied and then customized to match the monitoring requirements of specific Web services.

Web Services Management Pack: MOM 2005 introduces a new Web services availability and performance
Management Pack. Using Microsoft Application Center Test (ACT) technology, MOM can be set to providing continuous monitoring of variety of web applications, including ASP, ASP.NET, static HTML and a range of heterogeneous Web services. Through use of the Web Services Management Pack MOM will be able to test availability and performance of
Web services from multiple locations around the network, monitoring trends and alerting operators to failures or service degradation.
Table 1. Web Services Management in MOM 2000 and MOM 2005
Web Services Component
Operating System
IIS
ASP.NET
UDDI
Database
Application Specific
End-to-end Web Service
Availability
MOM 2000 Capabilities
10 MPs for Windows 2000 Server
& Windows Server 2003
IIS v6 MP
.NET Framework MP
Not available
SQL Server 2000 MP
Templates for creating custom rules
Not Available
MOM 2005 Capabilities
Updated Windows Server 2003 MPs (incl. state monitoring, topological views, tasks, adv. reporting, &c.)
Updated IIS v6 MP
Updated .NET Framework MP
New UDDI MP
New SQL Server “Yukon” MP
Templates for creating custom rules
New Web Services MP
With the
“Longhorn” wave of operating system components, servers, development tools and management solutions, management becomes a central attribute of the Windows platform, pervading all layers of the stack from software down to

the hardware. This provides a unique opportunity to bake manageability into Web services rather than adding it as an afterthought. In turn, this allows System Center, Microsoft’s next generation management solution, to focus on managing system optimization, providing higher level service, business impact analysis, and automating support processes through business orchestration.
At the core of this effort is the System Definition Model (SDM), an XML-based blueprint that captures and unifies the operational requirements and instrumentation of applications and Web services with data center policies, serving as an explicit contract between development, deployment and operations across the entire IT life cycle. SDM is a key component of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, a multi-year Microsoft and industry effort focused on driving down the costs and increasing the agility of building, deploying and operating applications and Web services in Windows environments. The creation of
SDM allows tighter management of the application at each stage:

Development Tools: Developer tools that support the SDM will enable architects and developers to easily describe the complete end-to-end structure of a distributed application, including installation & configuration specifications, instrumentation & automation catalogs, and operational constraints & policies.

Operating System: SDM support in the operating system will provide the ability to automate the provisioning of those applications and the underlying hardware resources which the application requires. Applications will be appropriately installed, upgraded and monitored for health and performance and the OS will also provide a service level view of these applications as their components may span many different servers in the data center.

Management Solutions: System Center, the next generation of management solution, encompassing and extending the functionality of MOM and Systems Management Server (SMS) is being designed to take full advantage of the SDM.
System Center will leverage the SDM and the management infrastructure to manage change and configuration, health,
SLA and performance, based on a deep service-level understanding of the structure and behavior of a distributed application, end-to-end.
These management services benefit all systems, especially complex distributed systems such as Web services. But in addition, the Dynamic Systems Initiative specifically addresses the unique requirements of Web services, and even leverages Web services technology for its internal workings. The SDM, installation manifests, events, even command line arguments are XML documents, open to use by any customer or partner. Management services expose Web services interfaces, allowing management solutions to securely reach out across platform and trust boundaries to manage all the components that make up a distributed Web service.
This Web services based architecture provides a robust foundation for industry partners to extend Microsoft’s management solutions, specifically to tie management of heterogeneous environments into System Center and to provide an end-to-end perspective for all Web services in an enterprise environment.
To realize the full benefits of management through Web services, and to permit complete end-to-end management of Web services, the industry standards that define Web services need to be expanded to include management. Microsoft will work with the industry to complete the emerging effort on standardization of Web services management.
For detailed information on Microsoft’s current range of management solutions see: http://www.microsoft.com/management
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication.
Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and
Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.
© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, Active Directory, Visual Studio, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.