Solutions

for Architects

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are now beginning to deliver on the promise of replacing the redundancy, connectivity and maintenance issues of classic Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) with reusable, disconnected and easily-managed modules of code. However, services are still all too often unmanaged and spread out across development environments, becoming unusable and hidden, and creating errors and bottlenecks in applications which are next to impossible to pinpoint, diagnose and fix in a timely fashion.

In response to the challenges of distributed architectures, the scope of responsibility for application architects has grown exponentially. The job of planning, discovering, managing and maintaining services is now placed squarely on the shoulders of the architect, regardless of how many other management and development duties he or she may already be balancing.

Intercept Studio streamlines architects’ most time-consuming tasks by providing real-time UML-style views of how all distributed components are actually functioning in production. Architects are able to see at a glance whether degradations and exceptions are related to application errors or to system performance, and can drill down from the widest architectural view to the most granular line-of-code without requiring logs, custom instrumentation, or fact-finding expeditions through other IT departments.

Providing Real SOA Governance

The more distributed the development environment, the more likely it is that developers will create services which do not match the careful plans laid out by application architects. At best, these runaway services are not reusable, and squander the company’s already-thin development time. At worst, they slow down or break distributed applications – often at joints which are hard to find and in ways which are difficult to diagnose and recreate without days or weeks of investigation. Architects, whose primary value is in the creation of new revenue-producing systems, instead spend their time combing through logs and debug files trying to untangle knots in systems which are already in production.

Intercept Studio reduces SOA diagnostics from a series of days to a series of mouse-clicks by delivering, in real-time, a complete root cause analysis of any fault or performance degradation, regardless of its source in a distributed system. That root cause analysis includes all the information needed to quickly isolate and resolve issues, including the exact blame component, a complete reproducible test case, associated member and local variables and parameters, and the precise line of offending source code.

Freeing Architects from Maintenance Tasks

Often, the actual resolution of a code issue can be accomplished by the most junior members of a development team. An “index out of bounds” error does not truly require an architect or senior developer to address. Unfortunately, the skills and intuition of the most senior architects and developers are required to find, diagnose and re-create issues before a more cost-efficient team member can be tasked with making the repair. With the TFS Incident Management Connector, Intercept Studio is capable of creating work items in Visual Studio 2005 Team System based on any alerts detected, allowing senior professionals to diagnose issues within minutes rather than days, and then to forward all of the line-of-code information necessary for resolution to the appropriate developers.
By automating communication and workflow between development tiers, development teams are far better equipped to quickly identify, isolate, and resolve application errors. Application architects, in particular, are then freed to spend their time creating new services and architectures rather than maintaining systems already in production.