Open Source Solutions

The final session for today goes into System Management of Mule and the the additional products that mitigate risk in SOA deployments. This was definitely the most heavily attended of the user sessions.

MuleHQ is a dashboard that provides device-level management of app servers, databases and other assets. Policy driven alerts that allow management against the SLA is also provided. The server side performs auto-discovery of services and assets of which Mule is aware. Mule components, connectors, routers and endpoints are monitored by MuleHQ. MuleHQ is still Hyperic.

The presentation on Mule Saturn started with the challenges of integration, as well as supportability and maintainability of the integration solution. Mule Saturn provides a reduction in discovery of problems and recovery from them to allow meeting SLAs by "instrumenting Mule" to allow increased monitoring and proactive response through Mule Saturn and MuleHQ. Mule Saturn provides a view into the integration process and data flow for business users, whereas MuleHQ provides monitoring for the technical users. There is role based access to allow editing of the XML only by designated users.

The first use case provided was for a Supply Chain Integration. The examples considers a batch of POs containing two orders, one that succeeds and one that fails. Drill down through hyperlinks is possible. Essentially, the use case walked us through Mule Saturn.

The second use case went through the workflow of approving an employee's expense report with a similar walk-through of Mule Saturn showing a failure in the process where the manager never approved the expense resulting from an email failure to communicate.