Progress Actional Release 8.1 Highlights
Release 8.1 expands the power of Progress® Actional® in providing uncompromised business transaction assurance across distributed, heterogeneous environments. Foremost, it extends Actional integration with the SAP NetWeaver platform from Java applications to include fine-grained visibility, tracking, and control for each individual transaction flow in SAP applications programmed in ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) as well. Release 8.1 also adds functionality for ensuring service quality in development in distributed, interconnected, service-based environments, not just in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. Here’s a closer look.
Progress Actional Enterprise
New functionality includes:
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Visibility with SAP ABAP Applications in SAP NetWeaver
In this release Actional extends its ability to monitor and manage applications in the NetWeaver environment—adding certification for applications written in ABAP to its current certification for Java applications. This integration provides unprecedented visibility—into messages flowing through and between these applications within NetWeaver as well as their dependencies and interactions with environments outside of SAP.
This is ground-breaking functionality. Other vendors' products monitor transaction flow only within NetWeaver; dependencies of applications written in ABAP outside NetWeaver are a black box. With Actional, visibility into applications written in ABAP spans outside of NetWeaver for the first time—with less than 2% overhead. As a result, with Actional 8.1, enterprises using SAP have greater insight into and control of SAP execution and performance. They can:
- Gain complete transparency within and between applications written in ABAP and beyond for insight into other environments that may negatively impact execution and performance.
- Establish and manage service-level agreements (SLAs), setting up alerts to enable proactive management of issues.
- Quickly and easily analyze the root cause of transaction issues (inside or outside of NetWeaver) before ABAP application performance or execution is affected.
- Gain complete transparency within and between applications written in ABAP and beyond for insight into other environments that may negatively impact execution and performance.
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Additional Platform Support
With Release 8.1 Progress® Actional® Enterprise provides two more options to the suite of integration/ESB platforms on which it can monitor and manage transaction flow. These are two increasingly popular platforms.
- Spring Framework is an open source application framework for the Java platform and .NET framework. It is among the most popular, if not the most popular, Java development platform— and, essentially, the next-generation application server.
- BizTalk is Microsoft’s core integration platform—currently with 10s of thousands of licenses.
Support for Oracle now includes Oracle 11g and for DB2 users DB2 v9.5 is supported.
- Spring Framework is an open source application framework for the Java platform and .NET framework. It is among the most popular, if not the most popular, Java development platform— and, essentially, the next-generation application server.
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Auditing and Logging through JMS
In Release 8.1, Actional Enterprise enhances its auditing and logging capabilities, providing more flexibility to users and further ensuring compliance mandates are met. Previously, Actional agents sent audit messages directly to a relational database. Now records can be sent via JMS as well. This option has several advantages. The receiving database can now be remote, not just in the same data center as the agent. The messaging system assures the audit trails are not lost if the network or database goes down. This capability also acts as a foundation for event driven architectures, allowing event consumers to easily gain access to the rich set of events occurring within business application.
Progress Actional Diagnostics and Progress Actional Application Development
In Release 8.1, Progress enhances Progress® Actional® Diagnostics and Progress® Actional® Application Development to provide service quality and validation beyond Web services and SOA.
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JMS Testing
With Release 8.1 developers using Actional Diagnostics and development teams using Actional Application Development can test assets that are built directly on JMS with no underlying SOA architecture. In other words, development teams can now develop and test SOAP services whether those services use HTTP or JMS as a transport. This added capability provides a complete testing solution for the Progress portfolio of offerings. This new feature also helps Actional users transition from SOAP over HTTP to SOAP over JMS or vice versa—without coding—for greater flexibility in expanding their service and application environments.
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Added Support
In Release 8.1, Actional extends its support for operating systems and Web services standards as follows:
Operating Systems
Standards Specifications
Actional Diagnostics
Mac OSX
SafariWS-I Basic Profile 1.2
Actional Application Development
Solaris
WS-I Basic Profile 1.2
