ISVs Help Manage Web Services

Managing Web services and applications that use them could become easier with the release of several management packs by Microsoft partners. The management packs integrate these partners’ Web services management products with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), letting MOM users monitor the health of applications that use Web services and respond to events that could degrade application performance. Such capabilities are critical to making Web services reliable but can be difficult to implement given that these applications often consist of long-running transactions spanning multiple computers and computing platforms (for example, in environments that include both J2EE- and .NET-based services).

Although native Web service monitoring features are lacking in MOM today, Microsoft plans to provide support in the next release of the product. While this is likely welcome news for companies looking to deploy Web services, it could squeeze ISVs hoping to make a market in management tools for such applications.