What can DPOD do for me?

DPOD provides the following main benefits:

• Speed up your troubleshooting process by an order of magnitude, thus freeing your administrators, operators, and developers to focus on other tasks.
• Proactive management of your Gateways network. You can quickly gain insights into services that require performance tuning (whether on Gateway or at the back-end), appliances that require upgrades in the near future, etc. and use internal built-in alerts.
• Administrators experience a noticeable reduction in support calls from consumers, developers, operators and managers. Developers and operators will be able to gain a self-service, direct, immediate insights into the workings of consumed services, and will no longer depend on the availability of a Gateway administrator for debugging and troubleshooting.
• Managers gain a bird's-eye view of their Gateways and SOA network, supporting informed decision making and long-term planning.
• DPOD lets you troubleshoot scenarios that current monitoring systems can not trace. E.g. A failure before a transaction started and locating a failing transaction across multiple machines and log-extensive files.
• Run maintenance task such Configuration Sync, Device backup and firmware upgrade based on best practices scenario and across your Gateways cluster.
• Provide internal information on execution flow, errors and latency issue for API Connect developers and admins with a unique integration with API Connect.
• DPOD expose all traditional services in a DevOps Portal allowing users not only see and search configuration based on security role but also run such action such Service WSDL refresh.
• DPOD produces a significant ROI shortly after deployment.
• Additionally, DPOD improves SLA performance due to a quicker, seamless troubleshooting process.

Who in my company will benefit from using DPOD?

DPOD can improve efficiency across all organizational roles involved in ensuring your services function properly:

• Service consumers and back-end providers – Your consumers are able to access the DPOD console directly in order to investigate service availability or other problems. Service errors resulting from faulty back-end services can be easily tracked down and resolved between consumers and back-end providers directly, without requiring an intermediary.
  Service providers can easily view transactions by origin IP address, discover who their main consumers are, and obtain operational data such as service latency, throughput, etc.
• System administrators – DPOD provides your administrators with all the data required to quickly assess the Gateway network state in terms of health, service availability, security and performance. DPOD’s single viewing console removes the need to log into each Gateway separately.
• Developers – DPOD provides developers with a central view of services, transactions, message payloads and full performance data. It can therefore serve as an invaluable tool during the development cycle. By provisioning developers with (restricted) access to DPOD, you can free up your administrators' time by removing the onerous and time-costly task of supporting developers during the debugging process. When a problem occurs, DPOD's data quickly points out the culprit, without the need to dive deep into logs or Gateway integration code.
• Managers – DPOD provides team leaders, CTOs and higher-level managers with an instant yet detailed insight into the state of their SOA network and services, all at a single glance. Full SLA information is easily aggregated, using data from DPOD's database.
• System operators – Operators can easily troubleshoot production errors and other types of malfunctions via the DPOD console. They can successfully track down the origin of most problems, even without specific knowledge of Gateway administration. DPOD’s single viewing console removes the need to log into each Gateway separately.
• Security officers – DPOD provides security officers with forensic information for services and transactions. Security violations are viewable and searchable by relevant categories such as content validation (e.g. XML attacks), authentication, certificate and encryption, etc. Future certificate expiration can be configured to display well in advance using the Expired Certificates view.

How does DPOD work?

DPOD leverages existing Gateway capabilities to perform its data collection.

It is designed to provide an non-intrusive troubleshooting solution, and requires no change to existing Gateway integration code.

In the case payload collection is required, a manual subscription will be created in the Gateway for a limited period of time for the duration of debugging.

This table lists changes that DPOD performs on your Gateway objects that enable the data collection required for DPOD.

Data Sources

DPOD collects its data from the following sources:

• Raw Gateway logs via the syslog mechanism - During initial setup, managed Gateways are configured to send syslog messages to DPOD. Those messages are then collected by DPOD’s syslog agents and stored into its Big Data store.
• Message payload via WS-M - DPOD can configure Gateways to send it full payload data via HTTP. The data is collected by DPOD's WS-M agents, and stored into a dedicated backlog. Payload data collection requires significant resources to collect and store (both by the Gateway and by DPOD itself). To minimize possible impact on the system, WS-M data collection has to be manually enabled, and will remain active for a limited period of time only.
• Additional information via SOMA polling – DPOD uses SOMA services to periodically poll managed Gateways for additional data, such as hardware components status, I/O, memory consumption, etc.

What sort of information does DPOD provide?

DPOD provides the user with the following information:

• Raw Gateway logs – Including all information issued by Gateway processes, as well as sysouts from custom Gateway integration code.
• Device-level data - Hardware, CPU, memory, etc. as well as configuration information such as domains, services, and more.
• Service-level data - Memory consumption, configuration data, errors to success ratios, etc.
• Transaction performance and latency information - This includes front-end and back-end latency, as well as detailed memory consumption analytics for each action within a particular Gateway policy.
• Security data – Including certificate expiration, content violations, encryption errors, and more.
• Payload data - Available on an ad-hoc basis, only when enabled via WS-M.
• Configuration Data - Service configuration is collected and prepared for search and run, impact analysis. Configuration is also expose in a DevOps Portal.
• Audit logs - Including restarts time and firmware level changes over time.

More Information

For more information and an online demo, please visit IBM DataPower Gateway page.