Hardening your Integration Solutions

As you've seen, creating AssemblyLines can be a pretty quick business. However, a completed AL run does not mean that your solution is ready for 'prime time'. Even simple integration tasks warrant a minimum of both forethought and outcome analysis.

Some pertinent questions to reflect on are:

• Is all source data being processed as expected? How can you confirm this?
• Are anomalies in data content and/or quality detected? Are they handled?
• Does processing affect other data sets, systems or ALs? How?
• Does the integration carry an audit burden?
• Who will be deploying the solution? Who will be using it, and who will administrate it, as well as how?

For long-running AssemblyLines, like those used for synchronizations and to power services, we can tack on additional considerations like availability and fault-tolerance, performance, scalability and security.

The goal of this last chapter is making you aware of these issues, plus a number of Security Directory Integrator features and techniques that we can use to address them.

Note: If you are new to SDI then don't worry if this chapter seems complex and difficult to follow. Instead, come back and re-read these sections as your experience and comfort with the system grows.

• Legibility, re-use and configurability
  All development work requires troubleshooting, maintenance and extension. SDI solutions are no exception.
• Logging and auditing
  SDI uses log4j to provide flexible log management. We can choose between a number of standard Appenders including for Unix syslog, Windows eventlog, daily files and rolling logs. New Appenders can be created or downloaded and used as well.
• Connectivity problems
  Connectivity problems can generally be divided into two categories: initialization errors and lost connections.
• AssemblyLine availability
  Improving AL availability means two things: 1) doing what we can to ensure that the AssemblyLines do not stop, and 2) restarting ALs that have stopped as quickly as possible. For scenarios like long-running migrations and synchronizations, restarted AssemblyLines may also need to continue where they left off at the point of failure.
• Scaling and performance
  
• Monitoring
  
• The AssemblyLine Debugger