The base of the economic, business and financial life is the collaboration of resources of different interests. In many cases this collaboration is not efficient enough, and is only present in a limited manner. In order for an enterprise system to be able to work efficiently, it must collaborate entirely and in real time with the resources it uses. Based on this concept, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) introduces services. The service makes the callable methods of a resource accessible to others through a standardized interface. If one wishes to use the resource, he can do so through the service. With the help of services different systems can be connected in a unified way.

After a certain size the management and monitoring of SOA-based systems becomes difficult due to the many connected services which make the system hard to examine. A high level overview of the system is needed where the services, their communications and their statuses can be seen. Without this required data it is difficult to implement efficient flow control for the services.

To resolve the mentioned difficulties a SOA specific management application would be needed which could make the services’ management and collaboration smoother and more efficient. Some vendors have such products however their uses in most cases are limited.

There are two popular approaches to monitoring applications. One says that monitoring should be done from the business side, concentrating on business transactions and services. According to the other approach a monitoring capability needs to be engineered into the architecture of services thus providing information about the status of the service.

The presentation intends to provide a solution based on the second approach by extending the web service channel stack with the mentioned monitoring capability which sends valuable information about the service to a monitoring server. This server stores the information which is then displayed in a graphical monitoring application in the form of service connections, statuses and communication.