Overview
TransCanada PipeLines Limited, a leading North American energy company, recognized the need for a core set of services that its IT teams could use and re-use to build business-specific Web services. Critical to this infrastructure were key management functions to ensure the performance and reliability of the systems. The company foresaw that without a solution for these management requirements, its Web services infrastructure and derivative applications would not be ready for enterprise-class use.

TransCanada turned to AmberPoint, which enables TransCanada to oversee and act upon the overall operational health of its Web services environment. Without requiring any additional coding to the company's existing Web services, AmberPoint plays an active role in system operation, monitoring XML messages for faults and automatically providing system failover to back-up Web services in the event of critical errors.

Enterprise-Class Web Services
TransCanada is one of the largest energy companies in North America. The company's network of approximately 38,000 kilometers of pipeline transports the majority of western Canada's natural gas production to the fastest growing markets in Canada and the United States. An early adopter of promising technologies, the company first began migrating to a service-oriented architecture in 1991 and began building Web services in 2001.

In its evolution to standards-based Web services systems, TransCanada started by building a core set of services that its IT teams could use and re-use when developing business-specific Web services-based applications. In the TransCanada architecture, each new Web service can leverage this infrastructure for such key functionality as a distribution list and messaging services, rather than including these capabilities in each and every Web service.

In order to deploy trustworthy, enterprise-class Web services for business-critical use, TransCanada required essential management components for its infrastructure, including the following capabilities:

• Metering and monitoring
• Reporting
• Notification and alerts
• Logging
• Failover

TransCanada required a scalable management solution that would integrate seamlessly into its existing Web services environment and would extend comprehensive management capabilities to all its business-specific Web services. TransCanada selected AmberPoint to meet these requirements because the AmberPoint architecture fit well into TransCanada's IT environment, and because its non-invasive approach and its ability to leverage the content and context of XML messages enable it to manage any new or existing application exposing an XML-over-HTTP interface without requiring code changes to the Web services themselves.

Comprehensive Management
AmberPoint enables TransCanada to oversee and act upon the overall operational health of its Web services environment. TransCanada uses three easily customizable AmberPoint dashboards to see real-time information on system performance and availability-service status, average response times and total messages per hour.

AmberPoint plays an active role in system operation. The agent-based management solution monitors XML messages for application- and system-level faults, automatically providing system failover to back-up Web services if an error is deemed critical. AmberPoint notifies the appropriate TransCanada IT staff in the event of a failed Web service or if traffic reaches a certain threshold. Additionally, AmberPoint performs an end-to-end system heartbeat, periodically sending XML messages through the system to check availability.

"AmberPoint's interoperable and non-invasive management empowers our IT department to better meet our service-level agreements with internal and external customers as our adoption of Web services gains momentum," said Martin Vant Erve, TransCanada's Web Services Architect. "It gives us the opportunity to have consistency across the enterprise in how we handle Web services management tasks such as metering, monitoring, failover and notification, where traditionally service management was implemented in a platform-specific manner, or not implemented at all."

TransCanada's initial deployment of AmberPoint is for its Distribution List Service (DLS), which enables TransCanada staff and applications to look-up organizational information and send messages to a variety of groups and individuals through different delivery mechanisms. Additionally, AmberPoint is managing an interoperable message queue service called "Cortex."