Yesterday I wrote about the new Integrated SOA Gateway (ISG). This major new functionality allows EBS customers to expose E-Business Suite PL/SQL APIs, Concurrent Programs, Business Service Objects etc as SOAP based web services.
Today I will walk through the new SOA Monitor, which allows system administrators to monitor incoming SOA traffic on an EBS instance.
Yesterday we invoked the FND_PROFILE service’s GET method to read the profile value for the FND_ANTIVIRUS_SERVER Profile Option. A simplistic example I am sure but it does demonstrate the possibilities of the new Integrated SOA Gateway.
Today we will see how that web service call shows up in the SOA Monitor. The monitor is a useful tool. At least we find it useful and hope that you, the customer, will too.
Yesterday we saw that EBS R12.1 returns a SOAP response to a SOAP based web service call:
Fig 1. SOAP response to our web service call into EBS
Okay, so far so good. From the outside world we know that we made a SOAP based web service call to our EBS instance, calling a EBS PL/SQL API exposed by the new Integrated SOA Gateway. We also saw that we got a good bang for our buck:
Fig 2. Value returned by web service call matches the the value in EBS instance
Well and good. But what about our paranoid (well, I am one, if only from the QA perspective!) system admins whose worst worry is somebody compromising the security of their system? What if somebody can make a web service call into their EBS instance and pull out the details of all their invoices? Worrying? I bet!
First of all, it is just not possible. We saw in yesterday’s post that the web service client must provide credentials to be able to invoke an EBS web service. There are two levels here:
- User Authentication: The caller is authenticated against the EBS instance based on the credentials they present as part of the WSSE Headers.
- User Authorization: So we have been authenticated. So far so good. But what are we authorized to see / update? This is where the SOAHeader I spoke about yesterday comes in play. Are you authorized to invoke this web service? Responsibility, Application, Security Group, Organization ID etc have to be provided before the Integrated SOA Gateway will allow the SOAP based web service call to go through.
So the web service client *must* authenticate and authorize itself before the actual EBS web service call is allowed. So we are safe. But what if we want an audit trail?
The EBS Applications Technology Group has provided a system to allow system administrators to “monitor” incoming SOAP web service calls via the SOA Monitor:
- Who made the request?
- What was the request? Full XML is available for review.
- What was the response from the Integrated SOA Gateway? If any.
The SOA Monitor is designed to answer these questions. The system administrator can search for incoming SOAP based web service calls by date and other parameters.
Fig 3. SOA Monitor search results screen
The system administrator can turn off the SOA Monitor by clicking the “Turn Off Web Service Monitoring” button on the SOA Monitor page.
A closer look at the search results table will show 3 columns:
- Status
- Request
- Response
Self explanatory column headings.
Clicking the Request icon for a web service invocation record will display the details of the request:
Fig 4. SOA Monitor – SOAP based web service request details
Note the SOAP Request column label and the link next to it. Clicking the link will give you the actual SOAP envelope that was sent as a part of the web service call.
Fig 5. The web service request as captured by the SOA Monitor
Okay. So far so good. The SOA Monitor captures all incoming SOAP web service calls.
What of the responses sent by EBS, if any?
The SOA Monitor captures the responses too!
Fig 6. SOA Monitor – Web Service Response
As you can see from the screen shot above, there is a link to the response. Clicking it shows the actual response XML sent back to the caller.
Fig 7. SOAP Response as seen from the SOA Monitor
So the EBS system administrator can monitor incoming SOAP based web service invocation traffic in to the EBS instance.
Note: Next in this series – Service Invocation Framework (SIF)
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