Bionanny is a tool for Web Services providers. It allows to monitor usage of the Web Services. It can intercept requests incoming from clients, pass it to the destination Web Service and measure how many times the service was invoke, how many different requests it got, and how long it took to return a response.

Because a Bionanny monitor (interceptor) has access to the whole SOAP payload (SOAP envelope and SOAP body) it can also log additional characteristics (called metadata) about requests, such as size of the input/output data, or the most often used data (parameter) values.

Bionanny itself is a Web Service. It has a well-defined API for logging monitored data and getting them back, either fully, or already cumulated (on the level of the whole services or on the level of individual operations).

Bionanny project includes several ready-to-use interceptors (in Java) and clients (both in Java and Perl). These can be directly used, but they also serve as the code examples/templates how to write own, general or site-specific, plug-ins.

	How does it differ from other Web analysers

The majority of the Web Services is accessed by HTTP protocol, using a well-established web servers or servlet engines (Apache, Tomcat, jBoss etc.). They all have their own capabilities to log accesses. So what can Bionanny logging offer on top of that?

• Bionanny logs not only number of requests but also the elapsed time spent by the Web Services.
• Bionanny has finer-grain perspective: it distinguishes between individual operations. Remember that a Web Service can have more operations (methods) and each of them is logged separately.
• Bionanny can log also other characteristics taken or derived from the request body. This metadata logging feature can, for example, make from a simple logging also a benchmarking tool.
• Bionanny can be configured to log separately 'just-now-running' requests - so one can see how many requests are currently, at the moment, served by a Web Service. This can be used, for example, for finding a good moment where to restart a service.

Bionanny

Getting started

The Architecture document describes what are the Bionanny pieces and how they fit together and with the Web Services environment. It is good to read it first.

The User Guides will help to build, deploy and actually use Bionanny. They are accompanied by FAQ to give less structured by perhaps more direct answers.

When you start writing your own monitors or Bionanny clients you will need to read about Bionanny API.

Bionanny

Acknowledgment

The original idea came from Mike Niemi (IBM). He also promoted the name Bionanny. The first un-official Bionanny meeting was held within a BioMoby developers meeting in CSHL (USA, NY) in spring 2004.

Martin Senger, currently the main developer, started working on Bionanny project at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), within the eScience initiative, as a component of, and funded by, the myGrid project.

There are many more people that we should acknowledge here. We thanks them for all suggestions and help. If there are pieces developed or contributed by others, they are properly indicated (in the code, etc.).

Especially, some code in the Perl implementation (e.g. error handling) was highly inspired by the BioPerl project.

The Bionanny project is hosted at sourceforge (the sourceforge logo should be persistent on the left, at the bottom of the navigation menu; if not please reload the page).

	Bionanny license

Bionanny is distributed under an Apache-like license. Here is the full LICENSE wording. This does not preclude that some parts, especially parts contributed by other developers, may have their own copyright notices.

	Reference for Bionanny

Nothing yet published about Bionanny.