Case Study: SOA Monitoring at Degussa Bank
About Degussa Bank
Degussa Bank GmbH is a german universal bank based in Frankfurt am Main, specialized in consumer banking. There are over 220 branches of Degussa Bank all over Germany, predominantly in industry, business and technology parks and on company locations. The balance sheet total constitutes 4,4 billion Euro for 2009. Degussa Bank was founded as GmbH out of a department of Degussa AG. In November 2006 a group of investors led by the private bank M.M.Warburg & CO in Hamburg bought Degussa Bank. Degussa Bank develops services for partner companies and manages their corporate credit cards. As an on site bank for private customers, Degussa Bank offers services for funds (from giro to call money), securities, old-age provisions, personal loan and construction financing.
Scenario
At present, Degussa Bank developes and administrates about 300 web services. Most of them provide access to several legacy systems, for example access to the banking backend Kordoba or to mercantile information agencies such as Schufa. By using the services, the clients get access to backend functions such as money transfers or the opening of a bank account. These implemented functions range over almost all sectors of retail banking, such as money transfers, customer and account administration, real estate and securities. These services have been developed in different technologies (JAX-WS, .NET) and in parts by external service providers.
Requirements
Today, hundreds of collaborators are using the provided web services concurrently and more and more web services are developed. Therefore, a well working administration and monitoring are increasingly important. Until now, these issues were implemented by the web service developers themselves, e.g. by using a journaling database. Consolidated analysis of these several different databases as well as cumulative log files are nearly impossible. A standardized approach that also decreases the costs of implementation is neccessary.
Challenges
Monitoring all company services, regardless of developers and technology, seemed to be be the hardest challenge. Especially uninterrupted availability is very important for the everyday business. To reduce the complexity of administration as far as possible, the registry should be self-learning and able to detect and include new services on its own.
Solutions
After a prolonged phase of evaluation, Degussa Bank decided to use a combination of Membrane SOA Registry and Membrane SOAP Monitor. Reasons were:
- Independence of vendors, platforms and technologies
- Good cooperation with the developers and fast response times
- Simple installation
- No licence fee
Benefits
The system administrators achieved a drastically shorter response time at the analysis of faults. For example, they are notified of possible upcoming failures just when the WSDL of a service is changed. A simple web form checks the working state of any given web service and thus eliminates possible points of failure.
Lessons Learned
The use of the registry drastically changed the philosophy of building web services. The developer becomes aware of the importance of namespaces and learns how to use them.
Return of Investment
Membrane SOAP Router and Membrane SOAP Registry can be deployed without additional costs. Thus, the effort confines itself to the setup of the described infrastructure. The installation is very simple and within few minutes the first services are registered. Some services based on the Apache CXF SOAP Engine caused problems. The fragmentation of a WSDL document in several documents couldn't get processed by the registry. After consulting with predic8, the import functionality was extended and available in the next release.
Result
The use of both products turned out to have been very reasonable for Degussa Bank and has become indispensable for the daily work.
Perspectives
For the future, we wish SOAP Monitor to get more closely connected to SOAP Registry. This would realize large synergistic effects. For example, SOAP Monitor could parse WSDLs and automatically register new Services. It would be nice to use the GUI to access separate requests to identify failures even faster.