Management

Administration and management of the application integration problem domain is primarily the responsibility of the management layer of the integration server. Because of the level of the technology's maturity and the fact that several enterprise management tools are on the market, too many integration servers are marketed with little or no management.

Application integration solutions require the ability to start and stop source and target applications, as well as the ability to monitor important statistics, such as performance, message integrity, and the general functioning of the entire application integration problem domain. Some integration server vendors are correctly anticipating the needs of application integration management and are creating separate products to address these needs, while enabling existing enterprise management tools to handle the special needs of application integration. These vendors stand to win the lion's share of this growing market.

The management layers of integration servers need to support other features, including the ability to monitor message movement through the system. These features must include alerts to re-queue throughput, alerts to re-queue availability, and end-to-end performance tracking.

Although it is too early to predict with certainty, it appears that a new generation of management tools built specifically for the application integration marketplace is on the horizon. However, until that generation arrives, users must either depend on what is bundled with the integration server or create their own management infrastructure.