Message tracking in SOAP-based web services

As web services become more prevalent, the nature of electronic transactions on the Internet changes from simple browser-to-business clicks to an orchestrated flow of messages between cross-enterprise services. Consequently, more than one service could participate in the federated execution of a single transaction. In such cases, the problem of end-to-end management becomes very important. The inherent cross-enterprise or distributed nature of the problem, security of information exchanged, and the complexity in correlating related messages into a single transaction make this problem challenging. In this paper, we present an approach to track and correlate messages between web services that are part of a single transaction. We do this by proposing management information exchange agreements between service providers, and a distributed message tracking algorithm that is executed within each service provider. We also explain the techniques for realizing our solution in the case of web services that communicate using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).