Management Focus

Management focus is important in ensuring efficient and effective operation, and managers should prioritize and dedicate their attention, resources, and effort towards improving integration operations. They should identify and set priorities, establish strategies and goals, and monitor progress to ensure that the company’s objectives are met efficiently and effectively. Management should also focus on continuous improvement to sustain operation excellence.

Improve Monitoring

To improve monitoring, it is recommended to monitor all servers and processes manually at fixed intervals, such as every 4 hours, and manually check the infrastructure usage status like CPU and memory. Additionally, monitoring can be improved through tools such as Splunk and Qlik, and the alerting mechanism can be enhanced by implementing automatic alerts/notifications upon process failure.

Resourcing and collaboration

Resourcing is crucial in ensuring efficient operation, and it is important to onboard resources with the right skill sets. These resources should first contribute to the development team and be trained frequently on security issues to prevent security incidents. They should also be encouraged to share knowledge across the team after issues are identified and resolved.

Coordination between the development team and operation team is essential, and DevOps methodology should be followed. Team lead should ensure that operation-friendly code is developed. The development team should also follow design principles and best practices and knowledge transfers should be completed between the operation and development teams, and the operation team should provide continuous feedback to the development team.

Analysis and reporting of issues.

Analyzing failures is crucial, and events generated by different processes should be monitored, failures should be analyzed to find the root cause, and corrective and preventive measures should be taken accordingly. Issues should be anticipated beforehand, knowledge articles should be created about issues, and an active to-do list should be maintained. If external issues cause processes to stop, they should be started after issues are resolved.

Status reporting to the management is essential, and the operation team should provide insight into the operations to the management. They should present a dashboard of incidents, service requests, failures, and improvements made and highlight major issues like failures, providing reasons for the failures. The operation team should be transparent to the management and show the corrective measures taken, asking for management support if needed.

Compliance and Security

To ensure compliance and security, internal audits should be done on frequent intervals to check process compliance. This audit should include all aspects of operational governance to ensure the team is fulfilling their duty. User access to the application should be checked and verified periodically, and the access of users who have left the team should be removed. Patching in HA environments should be done in sequence so that it does not impact the services. After patching is completed, server status should be manually checked. Pen test/security findings should be mitigated with priority, and vulnerability should be managed through patch updates or other measures. It is recommended to proactively look for security certificate renewals before expiry. DR testing processes should be deployed in production beforehand, and actual processes running in production may  not be used for DR testing as it might interrupt current business operations.

Fire and Forget Design Pattern

This is simple message exchange pattern where requester does not wait from any specific response/acknowledgement from provider. The requester just need HTTP OK or Error message from integration layer as soon as message is received. The integration layer   continues to process the messages further after sending HTTP OK response.

The integration processes ensure messages delivery are guaranteed to the target system.

Asynchronous design pattern can make use of fire and forget design pattern.

  Process

1. Requester will invoke the integration Process.
2. The integration process will send HTTP OK response to the requester immediately without waiting for completion of the processes.
3. The integration process validate, enrich and transform the request and invoke provider web service.
4. The integration processes may store the messages in a database or queue.

 Exception Handling

1. Process should be resubmitted by admin in case of error. Or target application can invoke the process again.

Use Case

When requester application does not need to know that request is reached to the final destination, this pattern can be used.  Also requester may provide callback service for getting the response from long running process.

Synchronous Message Processing –Hybrid Design pattern; Handle request and response message  Asynchronously in case of failure.

This pattern is a variant of hybrid design pattern. The difference is response messages also needs to be queued in case of failure.    The pattern is rarely used. To implement this pattern you should have 3 processes. 1 Main process and additional 2 batch processes.

Main Process.

 

1. The main  process will validate the request and if messages are ok, enrich and transform the messages and invoke provider service.
2. The process  will send the response in real time to the requester
3. The process will send the  failed messages( which could not be posted)  to the request message queue.
4. The process will send the  response messages  which could not be posted back to requester to response message queue.

Process 2.

This process  should be a scheduled processes which will read the messages from the queue or database as similar to earlier hybrid design pattern.

Process 3.

This process should be scheduled process which will read the file from Response messages queue and will try to push the messages to the source  or requester application. This is similar to process 2.

Use Case

This is similar to hybrid pattern use case. But  here additionally we are saving provider response messages so that you don’t need to invoke provider we services again in case of connection failure with requester.