WSO2 Launches Business Activity Monitor

Open source code firm WSO2 has launched WSO2 Business Activity Monitor to provide visibility into services oriented architecture-based services, transactions, and workflows.

WSO2, which translates roughly as oxygen for Web services, is bent on building out a portfolio of lightweight, Web services-based middleware which companies can use to build integrated services architectures. It is OSGi framework based software that follows a set of standards that make it easier for remote software objects to work together.

The Business Activity Monitor produces event-based metrics, such as server response times and data polled by a periodic query to a running system. The information about an enterprise service or system, such as an enterprise service bus, is gathered and collated for presentation to a system administrator.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of WSO2, said in the announcement that services were proliferating in enterprises, including those that integrate with legacy systems. But "business insight into these workflows is often limited," as software events move across new services and legacy systems. The WSO2 Business Activity Monitor offers information on those integrated services so that "IT and business users have up-to-the-moment views across their entire infrastructure," he said.

The monitor can produce alerts when a deviation from a key performance indicator occurs. The monitor will work with Microsoft SQL Server, the open source MySQL system owned by Sun Microsystems, and open source H2, or Hypersonic 2, by Thomas Mueller.

The information gathered by the monitor is presented through an enterprise portal server, WSO2 Gadget Server, which displays customizable dashboards to end users. Gadgets in the dashboards can analyze and display the information in standard or user-customized ways.

The Gadget Server is based on the Apache Software Foundation's Shindig project, the reference implementation for Google Gadgets and OpenSocial specifications. Google Gadgets are simple JavaScript and HTML applications that can be embedded in Web pages to produce spreadsheet functions, a calendar, or a clock. OpenSocial is a Google API using JavaScript and HTML that lets developers build social networking functions that work across multiple Web sites.

WSO2 is trying to include ease-of-use features in its Gadget Server portal, making it possible for freely available display devices, such as colored heat indicators, charts, and counters, to be built into Gadget Server and used to display business process information. "Giving business a dashboard into the core enterprise systems is one of the most effective uses of a well-designed SOA," said Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, in the announcement. "Gadget Server is defining the next generation of portals," he claimed.

Both products are available immediately as free downloads from the WSO2 Web site under the Apache open source license or as an Amazon Machine Image virtual machine running in the Elastic Compute Cloud. They also run under VMware's ESX Server hypervisor.

WSO2's revenue flows from technical support for its product line along with consulting services on product training and implementation.