Framework for Analyzing SOAP Messages in Web Service Environments

Service Oriented Architectures can be quite complex which makes managing and monitoring them hard. Message exchanges as well as complete message flows are important when it comes to analyzing the performance of systems and identifying problems. The use of SOAP as the common message format for web services enables interoperability and extensibility. Furthermore it can be used for logging and analysis because its components follow web service specifications. We present a framework that allows for logging, analyzing and visualizing these messages across a distributed system. The proposed framework consists of a flexible logging module that captures incoming and outgoing messages of a web service. The log parsing library provides various methods for normalizing, correlating across geographically distributed sites and analyzing messages. The visualization tool is able to display relationships between the web services as well as message flows. In utilizing this adaptable framework for analyzing SOAP messages it is possible to overcome the challenges of complexity and disparity that monitoring and management approaches face in web service environments