SAM (Service Activity Monitoring) is here and it will be big. Mark already wrote an excellent introduction [1] to service activity monitoring and I would like to use that opportunity to kick start the discussion about SAM's building blocks / technical assets.

[1] http://jboss-overlord.blogspot.com/2008/06/goodbye-bambi-hello-samsi.html

EventProcessor and streams

SAM is going to be driven by a CEP engine which allows near real time analysis of event messages as well as inclusion of historical data. Consider it the "brain" behind SAM's BAM/BI capabilities. It basically deals with event message aggregation, filtering and forwarding. Any event processor can be associated with stream inputs and stream outputs. Stream input allows you to feed event messages into the event processor (i.e. JMS event stream input) while stream outputs basically act as a mechanism to forward event streams, either in order to react (on-when-then) or to really forward event streams within EPN's (event processor networks).

Visualization and monitoring

Monitoring should enable you to react on changes to your service infrastructure in a timely manner. In order to so, you need to see what's going on now and be able derive the required information which allows you to drive subsequent action. This process is highly dynamic and needs to be done at runtime. We'd expect users to compose views according to their needs, modify the queries at runtime and to drill down to a level of detail that reveals answers to their questions. Because this reaches across enterprise responsibilities (IT, Sales, Management) it gears towards less-technical people which are part of the decision taken process. Thus visualization and it's flexibility is key to monitoring service infrastructures.

Simulation

Event pattern recognition and correlation becomes a non trivial task if you think of an emerging complexity of service infrastructures. To derive the adequate fixture it requires thorough testing of the queries you put into place. Thus we consider event processing simulations a main step in overall development cycle.