Web Services for Interoperable Management (Continued)

When you inspect the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document generated to define the MCF Web service, you find that there's nothing really Web services-centric about its content. It defines a ConnectorService that has, among other operations, a GetData operation that requests arrays of new alerts and old alerts. An alert XML Schema type defines 27 kinds of child elements, all relating to the Windows enterprise.

Web Services' Potential for Management
Another ambitious vision of how Web services can provide interoperable management is taking shape with the WS-Manageability specification, which is intended to describe how you can use Web services to manage Web services. The Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical Committee of OASIS, a standards body active in Web services, is developing WS-Manageability and keeping an eye toward using the same Web service standards for managing other IT resources in the future (see Resources).

Whereas the MOM product connectors maintain a sort of maternal link back to MOM 2000, WS-Manageability promises a kind of any-to-any interoperability. The Unicenter Web services manager now has its own proprietary WSDL, Computer Associates' Hui explains, so only Unicenter agents can communicate with it, albeit from divergent servers. With WS-Manageability, he says, any Web services management provider's agent can communicate with any other provider's manager. The agent WSDLs and manager WSDLs will be standardized.

A WS-Manageability implementation doesn't exist yet, and while the likes of BEA Systems, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are well represented on the committee, Microsoft is not involved in the effort.

That kind of interest, and competition, suggests the broader promise of Web services for management. But are Web services protocols the future lingua franca of operations management? At least at the higher levels where applications can write and read SOAP messages, they should be. Eventually.

In the meantime, the current crop of Web services management tools provide integration with sister products or more primitive management protocols such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). It's common for a Web services management tool to be able to send a trap to an SNMP manager on an alert condition.

In the long term, it might not matter if Web services ultimately pervade operations management as long as you're happy with what you can get out of the box. If your central management tool can transparently exchange data with other managers and agents, who cares how it exchanges the data?

About the Author
Mitch Gitman is a developer and consultant specializing in Web services, XML data binding, and J2EE/.NET Framework interoperability. He recently worked on Web services and XML Schema implementations for a major system and tools vendor. Reach Mitch at mgitman@usa.net.