Web applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) promise to greatly improve IT efficiency and business agility. SOA establishes data and protocol standards so that existing internal and third-party application modules or services can be reused and orchestrated into business applications. Unfortunately, while SOA enables the rapid implementation of business applications, it also greatly increases the complexity of managing performance when these applications are deployed in production – often diminishing the benefits of the SOA adoption. Without an effective way of monitoring application performance, and quickly diagnosing and correcting problems, there is a high likelihood that an SOA could be dead on arrival (DOA).
