Logging in web services context

What is logging? What is logging in web services context? Do we really need it? What’s the benefit of it? Let’s discuss…

Logging to me is registering certain relevant events in a repository. Doing so we can revisit the repository, and retrieve some important performance of the key indicators. I would like to approach it from 10,000 ft. high.

We are living in a world which transitioned from single monolithic application management to enterprise-scale distributed interoperable systems. We also took out enterprise level processes out of secure locker and shared them with the suppliers and business partners. With the distributed, loosely coupled and interoperable systems; grew the complexity of maintenance of them. Technically, Web services are at the interfaces of these distributed systems working hard to take the messages and supply the responses. The value proposition from a business perspective, for a manager, is that - different departments in a large enterprise are communicating seamlessly and benefiting them financially and improving the time to reach the customer. With that said, it would be ideal to have a good monitoring system would help both technical folks and business managers.

How would logging help the technical person… just to give you an idea…

- by logging the exceptions in a sub system.
- By giving the speed of processing of each of the requests
- Can tell them whether a system is being used by clients. ( In other words, it will indicate whether system that was built by spending thousands of dollars is being used at all. Kind of relevant is not it?)

This list can grow much larger, as I start listing every good reason.

Similarly, the managers might know..

- Processes being integrated in the enterprise
- Performance of their processes , in terms of number of clients being served, the time it took to process each client request.
- Effectiveness of each project that they sponsored. Etc.

Now you got the point .. a good monitoring system will not hurt the enterprise, instead it will help the enterprise. And it is more relevant as the complexity of the systems grow and also as the number of systems being integrated grow. So, you do agree that it is necessary in a big corporate, right? … Right.

And, now you might say, how is this philosophical outburst relevant to logging web services. For those folks, I would like to say this – service orientation based web services are the interfaces to these complex sub systems and are constantly being criticized for failures in their service level agreements(SLA) conformance.

I don’t know whether it is just me, or you too, might have seen the poor web services being criticized for being too slow, failures that they cause and changes of the interfaces that the clients are not notified of…. It is tough to be the middle guy. So, it is very important to protect them (web service). Now, you might think that I have a point. I know, I am glad I convinced you.

Finally, how do you implement logging in web services… it is a topic for another blog discussion, and we will do it soon. – Chow.