Support for the SOA Run-Time Environment
CentraSite provides tools that support the management and monitoring of services in the run-time environment. Using CentraSite, administrators can define policies that execute on policy enforcement points (PEPs) that reside between the consumer and the service endpoint. These policies typically perform security-related activities (such as authentication and message encryption/decryption), auditing/logging tasks, and performance reporting functions.
When webMethods Mediator is used as a policy enforcement point, administrators can define and deploy "virtual services" into the run-time environment. Virtual services operate as consumer-facing proxies for the endpoints where Web services or XML services are actually hosted. Besides performing security, logging, and monitoring activities, a virtual service can also execute advanced mediation steps such as message routing, load-balancing, failover handling, and message transformation.
CentraSite supports the run-time environment by enabling administrators and analysts to:
Define and manage standard run-time policies.
Attach run-time policies to Web services and deploy the policies to specified PEPs in the run-time environment.
Define and deploy “virtual services,” to perform mediation steps such as routing, load-balancing, failover and/or message transformation.
Monitor the run-time performance of services and identify services that fail to meet specified thresholds.
Out of the box, CentraSite provides support for the following:
webMethods Mediator, which is a PEP that provides policy enforcement, service mediation and monitoring capabilities.
webMethods Mediator enforces run-time policies that you create in
CentraSite.
