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Actional
ObjectStore
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PSE Pro
™

Enterprise
Interconnected Applications: Unique Management H i g h li g hts

Challenges With Progress Actional

® ®

Enterprise, you can manage

Companies invest in interconnected, distributed applications for their mission- interconnected applications from

critical processes to get benefits like easy integration, business agility, lower IT costs, development through application
support to assure business
and, of course, more revenue. Then during runtime issues occur: sporadic process
transaction success and optimize
interruptions, lost messages, business exceptions, or order fallout. Customers, operations to serve business goals.
partners, and channels are negatively impacted. Revenue suffers.
Unfortunately, distributed, interconnected applications are inherently
complex to manage successfully across their lifecycle. During runtime, these often-
service-based applications execute across heterogeneous systems, may be owned
by different organizations, and reside in different locations, making visibility difficult.
Increasing volumes of traffic compound this complexity, leading to an increase in
issues and, therefore, in IT time and costs to resolve them. Traditional management
tools are used after users report problems, and business takes a hit. Other tools
designed for managing service-based applications require significant IT resources for

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time-consuming re-coding and massive re-configuring and additional

expensive server power to work.
Developing high-quality services is also challenging. There is a heavy
reliance on XML as well as difficulties in debugging and testing distributed
software and a heightened need for cross-team collaboration as services are
combined and reused to create larger business-critical applications.
With all of these obstacles, how can you manage current applications
that are core to critical business operations and revenues immediately, to
assure transaction success and gain benefits, and build quality services
consistently, to avoid issues? Just as important, how can you do all of this
efficiently and cost-effectively?

Managing Interconnected Applications Cost-

effectively: A Lifecycle Approach
With Progress Actional Enterprise, you can assure business
® ®

transaction success from development through application support and

optimize operations to serve business goals. You can get up and running
quickly and cost-effectively with your existing applications and have the
high performance and scalability you need for future operations without
proliferating expensive hardware. Because of Actional’s comprehensive,
powerful tools and a unique architecture, you need fewer IT resources, and
they can work more productively across the lifecycle. In addtion, there are
fewer problems, faster resolution when problems occur, and a low total cost
of ownership.

Drive Quality in Design Time

Actional Enterprise offers comprehensive validation and quality
tools for SOA and service-based applications. These include a pre-production
collaborative platform that makes it easier for all project team members to
deliver well-tested, scalable, and policy-compliant services and applications.
Robust features allow architects, developers, testers, and business analysts
to work together to drive quality—from development to application support,
and beyond.

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Collaborate across the Entire Project Team With Actional Enterprise,

teams have powerful
As services are being designed, developed, and tested, project teams
visualization, diagnostic,
can collaborate and share quality-related assets, test results, and compliance
and testing capabilities
policy rules to eliminate problems earlier in the lifecycle when they are easier
that pinpoint critical
to find and less costly to fix. Actional’s integrated collaboration, testing, and
problem areas requiring
compliance tools allow individuals to:
early attention.
>> Share Test Suites, Load Tests, and assets across one or
more teams—so they can leverage each other’s work from
development through application support. Users can create and share
Workspaces that contain Web services, contracts, messages,
recorded actions, simulated operations, and shared tests. There are
also project partitions called “Service Spaces” that enable teams
to organize, collaborate, and share project assets while limiting
access to other organizations sharing the same server. Shared assets
containing context-rich data, test simulations, compliance rules,
artifacts, and more can be used for unit, functional, load, regression,
and acceptance testing, without the need for versioning.

Service Space

Service Space
Service Spaces dramatically
Service Space improve team collaboration and
Integration productivity by allowing everyone
Testing
to
Governance on the service team to access test
Actional
Diagnostics Application suites, load tests, assets and
Support Development
and artifacts in one shared place.

Workspaces Test Suites

Actional
Enterprise
Load Check Policy Check

>> Understand service behavior, without writing code or knowing

XML—by “invoking” services and viewing the response in real time,
in an easy-to-understand XML message format called “Pseudocode .”
™

Clicking “resend” sends the message to the server multiple times while
making small changes. This makes testing extremely fast and efficient

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for everyone—without writing a single line of code or requiring

deep knowledge of XML. WSDL contracts and REST-style contracts
described in Web Application Description Language (WADL) can also
be imported, viewed, compared, and graphed.

Validate Service Behavior, Performance,

Scalability
With Actional Enterprise, teams have powerful visualization,
diagnostic, and testing capabilities that pinpoint critical problem areas
requiring early attention as well as automated policy enforcement tools
to help prevent runtime issues:
End-to-end visualization is provided without coding. Actional’s
patented Flow Mapping technology automatically discovers and traces
®

transaction flow across the production environment as well as simulated

environments in development. Flow maps enable developers to optimize
services for production by showing how application components are put
together and how they will work. Actional also provides statistics on the
availability and performance of each service and shows who is using what
service. During migration, team members can make sure that only the
appropriate people are accessing services in the proper environment.
Diagnosis and testing, early and often, ensure that services
are free of architectural issues typically coded in pre-production that can
cause transaction failures or downtime and be difficult to find and fix in a
heterogeneous, distributed runtime environment. To mitigate these risks,
developers, testers, and QA professionals can use the following features
to optimize runtime reliability, integration, performance, and scalability:

>> Easy-to-use, powerful unit, functional, and regression

testing—help developers and testers to identify and resolve
performance problems as services are being created and tested.
>> Service simulation and scenario testing —give developers
and their managers a deeper, more detailed understanding of Web
service behavior, with little or no coding. Users can simulate services
and replay lists of actions to verify that responses match existing

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benchmarks. Users can also create scenario tests based on captured With Actional Enterprise
or invoked messages or by supplying parameters to powerful at runtime you can spot
templates created directly from a WSDL. delays, missed steps,
operational anomalies,
>> Load testing—allows members of project teams without specialized
and lost transactions
performance and load testing skills to create load tests for up to 100
and pinpoint looming
virtual clients, with no coding required.
issues early—to avoid
Policy compliance enforcement assures that services perform full-blown incidents and
well in production and will interoperate as services are reused and minimize downtime.
applications change. Actional Enterprise promotes a “contract first” approach
and offers features that ensure services adhere to industry and corporate
standards and perform well in production:

>> Policy authoring and checking—allow pre-production teams

to create and enforce SOA design standards by combining industry
policy sets (e.g., WS-I Basic Profile, WS-Security) with customized
organizational best practices.
>> Contract annotations—give individuals the ability to add comments
to particular parts of a contract definition to clarify its usage. This turns
a WSDL contract into a center point for learning about a Web service.

Managing Existing Applications: Detect Issues

Proactively
With Actional Enterprise at runtime you can spot delays, missed
steps, operational anomalies, and lost transactions and pinpoint looming
issues early—to avoid full-blown incidents and minimize downtime. Key
capabilities include:
End-to-end visibility with automatic discovery and tracking:
No coding. No performance impact. It just works. Actional’s patented Flow
Mapping technology automatically discovers and maps all services and their
®

interdependencies across an end-to-end transaction in today’s heterogeneous,

distributed production environments while adding just microseconds of latency. It
also updates itself when services change—without coding or modeling.

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>> Tracking flow through unmanaged nodes—Actional relates the

data fields of the inbound messages to outbound messages in the
managed nodes. As a result, you have visibility into every process step
including those on systems in the transaction path lacking an agent.

>> Real-time and historical process data—are available in real-time Figure 1: Actional’s patented Flow

dashboards and historical reports. You always know what’s happening, Mapping technology automatically
discovers all services and their
or not happening, in the runtime environment and can compare it to
interdependencies.
past performance—without manual data gathering and correlation.
>> Unmatched integration and interoperability —enable
enterprise-wide monitoring and management. Actional easily
integrates and interoperates with a wide range of heterogeneous
computing resources--applications, data sources, network devices,
middleware, and registries/repositories—and mediates multiple
message protocols. (See “Technical Specifications” on page 13).

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Diagnose and Repair Problems Quickly Maximize uptime,

minimize support-time
When problems occur, Actional Enterprise enables fast root-cause
and costs, and keep
analysis to prevent business interruptions and service-level agreement (SLA)
customers, partners, and
violations. As a result, you can maximize uptime, minimize support-time and
channels satisfied.
costs, and keep customers, partners, and channels satisfied:

>> Policy authoring and policy-based alerting —allow you to

take action before a crisis occurs. With an easy-to-use, centralized
interface, experts can quickly and efficiently create business, security,
and compliance policies, including service alert thresholds and actions
for active IT management of SLAs. Unique to Actional, policies can
be authored to meet specific business needs– from simply monitoring
average metrics or setting policy for a single transaction, to creating
a single policy that combines multiple metrics and multiple classes
of service. When a policy is violated, Actional automatically gathers
information to present a complete view of the nodes involved in the
policy violation as well as statistics related to the violation. An alert
is also sent so you can respond before end users report the problem
or it negatively affects business. Policies can be applied to managed
or unmanaged nodes in the transaction flow; to an entire process; or
Figure 2: Alert with detailed flow
to abstract types of information, such as “personal identity.” map of a “violating” transaction

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>> Custom log management —gives you greater insight into the
application layer by integrating the Actional audit log with runtime-
generated application errors and events. This coupling of runtime audit
data with key application-level logging (embedded during design time)
allows you to diagnose application-specific problems more quickly and
easily without the IT time and cost of grepping log files.

Figure 3: Actional dashboard with

>> Exception management —enables the support team to collaborate business analytics
with the pre-production team for faster, accurate problem resolution.
When an alert is triggered, the support team can perform root-cause
analysis to find the “offending” system, and the Actional audit log
captures the message and all contextual information. The audit log
of the runtime request can then be transferred into a Workspace
on the Actional Development Server, where business analysts and
developers can collaborate on the problem. They can compare the
content of the failed message to the content of a prior successful
message, to detect differences. Then they can create a test case
and add it to a Test Suite for regression testing. Once the team has
determined the cause of the problem, the message can then be fixed,

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updated, invoked, and resent back through the application to get the
order properly processed. (See Figure 4, page 11.)

Prevent Business Loss, Optimize Business

Outcomes
Actional Enterprise provides a business perspective on executing
transactions as well as tools to dynamically manage service behavior to
optimize business outcomes—for example, to provide the best service to
high-priority customers, partners, and channels.

>> Business insight for decision support —Flow Mapping relates

end-to-end business process execution to the underlying IT activity
without manual modeling. It captures service levels, process
metrics like order-to-fulfillment times, and key business indicators
as transactions flow across network systems—even on unmanaged
network nodes. You can simultaneously view and analyze this
information by individual customer, customer class or group, region,
division, or any other custom dimension. These multi-dimensional
analytics are available in both real-time operational views and user-
configurable, browser-based dashboards in graphical formats for
decision support.
>> Automatic and manual controls for managing operations to
support business goals—You can modify application behavior to
accommodate temporary issues like congestion or service outages
or control long-term service delivery, for example, giving priority
processing to high-value transactions and important customers.
During service upgrades and versioning, you can also move
consumers of a service to the new version over time. These actions
are achieved through policies, alerting, content-based routing, load
balancing, and failover.
>> Policy-based controls for security and compliance —Actional
can mediate security across heterogeneous platforms and Web
services standards and includes support for WS-Security. (See
“Technical Specifications” on page 13.) It also avoids potential

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security breaches and prevents unintended usage of services through Actional applies policies
the enforcement of trust zones. Trust zone policy prevents message toend-to-end processes
traffic from reaching service endpoints if it hasn’t passed through wherever they flow,
designated security check point. allowing processes
and services to change
In addition, while alternative approaches can only apply policies
without requiring
to services and operations, Actional applies policies to end-to-end
policy changes or
processes wherever they flow, allowing processes and services to
re-applications.
change without requiring policy changes or re-application. Actional
also applies policy to abstract information types, such as “personal
identity” or “credit card details,” providing consistent control over
sensitive information. In addition, it acts based on the context of a
message, such as shipping information, to prevent sending goods to
restricted destinations—for compliance enforcement.

>> Service governance through integration and rogue service

control—The optional Actional Governance Integration Module
integrates with leading registries/repositories, feeding them metrics
on the actual performance of services and on service dependencies.
This information helps IT operations and developers to understand
the impact of service versioning and maintenance, reducing runtime
disruption. The integration also enables Actional to automatically
discover rogue (i.e., unauthorized) services and governs their activities
according to applicable policies. This action ensures that security and
regulatory compliance are not compromised and prevents capacity
overloads from unplanned services.

Fewer IT Resources, Less Hardware, Low Total

Cost of Ownership
Actional Enterprise provides all of these powerful features with a low
TCO, based on a unique architecture that provides:

>> Non-invasive monitoring and management with no coding and

minimal configuration—Actional ties into existing applications
on the network to leverage their message processing. In this way
it automatically discovers and tracks nodes with no coding (and

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fewer IT resources), no duplicate processing, and only microseconds

of latency. That means you can begin to manage your existing
applications as well as introduce and evolve applications quickly
and easily. Because Actional requires less than two percent of CPU
capacity per network node, you get high performance and cost-
effective scaling on the network.

Application Application
Owners Development

Security and
SOA Owners Compliance Staff

PRODUCTION PRE-PRODUCTION

Monitor Transaction Change

Succeeds STAKEHOLDERS New

Transaction Improve
Fails Stakeholders
Collaborative environment for
centrally
sharing validation assets.
create and manage
Eliminate issues early in the 1. Prototype
1. Policy policies.
Violation development lifecycle. & Develop

2. Message 2. Compliance
Capture

3. Root-Cause 3. Functional
Actional Servers Testing
Analysis

MANAGEMENT LAYER
4. Message 4. Load
Analysis Testing

Faster exception management Policies are managed centrally and

5. Repair where failed messages are enforced locally, removing the server 5. Deployment
& Resend
analyzed, fixed, and resent to as a bottleneck or single-point-of-
production. failure.
Transaction Operate
Succeeds

6. Test Case External 6. Support

Created Services

DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS
Agent Role

Visibility Control Enforcement Figure 4: Actional architecture

diagram-plus process flow

 lso, the Actional Management Server is never a single point of

A
failure or a bottleneck. Message content is never sent across the
network, and policy execution is fully distributed to enforcement
points on the network. As a result, the server can support more

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than 1,000 managed systems, and companies can build and scale
enterprise-class, distributed, service-based applications without
proliferating costly servers.

>> Efficient, cost-effective policy management —Only Actional

fully decouples the policy lifecycle from the service development
lifecycle, enabling centralized management and distributed
enforcement of security, compliance, and business policies (such as
SLAs). This separation allows policies and services (or processes
where they apply) to version independently, without any lapse in
policy enforcement or disruption of transactions—and without time-
consuming, costly re-coding or re-application.

T his approach also puts policy in the hands of domain-specific experts

and empowers them to define policy once and apply it appropriately
throughout the network --assuring that no service falls between the
cracks, for reduced risk. It also relieves service developers of coding
policy into services (and re-coding when policies or services change),
reducing IT time and costs and decreasing the time-to-market for new
and changed applications.

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Broad Support: Technical SPECIFICATIONS

Actional integrates and interoperates with a wide range of IT resources
and mediates multiple message protocols and security credential types.

Actional Management Server is certified to run on the following

platforms:
Operating Browsers Application Databases Java Virtual
Systems Servers Machine

Microsoft Windows Microsoft Internet Oracle WebLogic SQL Server Sun JDK
Explorer Server (formerly
Red Hat Linux, Oracle Oracle Jrockit
BEA WebLogic JVM (formerly BEA
Enterprise Linux, Mozilla Firefox
Server) DB2 Jrockit JVM)
pSeries
IBM WebSphere PostgreSQL
Solaris (including
the x86 series) JBoss Server MSDE
HP-UX Oracle Application Apache Derby
Server (OAS)
IBM AIX
SAP NetWeaver
SUSE Linux
Enterprise Glassfish
Application Server
(Enterprise and
Open Source)

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Actional Management Server provides visibility into applications on

the following platforms and software programs:
>> Oracle WebLogic Server >> Oracle Service Bus (formerly
(formerly BEA WebLogic AquaLogic Service Bus)
Server) >> Progress OpenEdge
® ®

>> IBM WebSphere >> Progress Orbix

® ®

>> JBoss Server >> WebMethods Integration

>> Oracle Application Server Server
(OAS) >> X-broker
>> Systinet WASP/J >> Lombardi TeamWorks
>> Microsoft .NET framework business process
>> SAP NetWeaver Application management (BPM)
Server software

>> Progress Sonic ESB

® ®
>> TIBCO ActiveMatrix
Business Works BPM
>> Progress SonicMQ
® ®

software
>> Progress Artix
® ®

Protocols and interfaces supported include Axis, SOAP, REST, POX,

EJB, JMS, Servlets (HTTP), Jakarta, HTTP client, ADO.Net, RMI, and JDBC.
Actional Enterprise also integrates with a variety of standards-
based, third-party identity management, entitlement management, and
SSO technologies including Kerberos, RSA Federated Identity Management,
Oracle Access Manager, CA TransactionMinder, Tivoli Access Manager, HP
SelectAccess, and Securent.

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Team Server System Requirements

Server Database Manager

>> 2 GHz processor or faster >> Microsoft SQL Server 2000

>> 2 GB memory (recommended) and SQL
Server 2005
>> 836 MB disk space
>> MySQL 4.1 and 5
Operating System >> Oracle 9i, 10g, 10g Express
and 11g
>> Microsoft Windows Server
2003, XP Professional (SP1, >> Apache Derby (Embedded)
SP2 or SP3) and Vista
Browser
>> Linux, including Red Hat
Enterprise >> Microsoft Internet Explorer
Linux 3 and 4 for x86 6.0, or above
>> Firefox 1.5 or above
>> Safari

Progress Sof t ware

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) is a global software company that enables enterprises to
be operationally responsive to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. Our goal is to
enable our customers to capitalize on new opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. Progress
offers a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class infrastructure software spanning event-driven visibility
and real-time response, open integration, data access and integration, and application development and
management—all supporting on-premises and SaaS/cloud deployments. Progress maximizes the benefits of
operational responsiveness while minimizing IT complexity and total cost of ownership.

Worldwide Headquarters
Progress Software Corporation, 14 Oak Park, Bedford, MA 01730 USA
Tel: +1 781 280-4000 Fax: +1 781 280-4095 On the Web at: www.progress.com

For regional international office locations and contact information, please refer to the Web page below:
www.progress.com/worldwide
Progress, Actional, Artix, OpenEdge, Orbix, Sonic, SonicMQ, and Business Making Progress are trademarks or registered trademarks
of Progress Software Corporation or one of its affiliates or subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Specifications subject to change without notice.
© 2009 Progress Software Corporation and/or its subsidiaries or affiliates. All rights reserved.
Rev. 11/09 | 6525-127987