To answer the question, take a step back and think about what an Application Gateway is. An Application Gateway takes tasks such as application integration and application security and it moves them into a piece of network infrastructure (which may be virtual or physical). By moving these tasks out of applications and onto the network, you make the tasks run faster, and easier to manage since they are now decoupled from the applications themselves.
So, breaking it down, there are two things going on here: (1) moving integration and security tasks onto network infrastructure, and (2) managing the Gateway as a piece of network infrastructure. It follows logically that there are two distinct roles involved here: (1) The person configuring services and policies on the Gateway, and (2) the person operationally managing the Gateway. Person (1) knows about APIs, apps, and policies. Person (2) does not need to know anything about APIs (much less know anything about REST or XML) but knows all about SNMP, Splunk, load-balancers, and NAT.
This is why Vordel provides two distinct training courses, aimed at these two different people. For person (1), who will be registering APIs and SOAP services on the Gateway and applying policies to them, we provide the Vordel Certified Systems Engineer (VCSE) training. This involves registering APIs (via their URLs), choosing policies to apply to them, and pushing the policies out to Gateways. It includes SOAP and REST. For person (2), we provide the Vordel Certified Network Administrator (VCNA) training. This explains how to monitor the "speeds and feed" of a Gateway, where alerts can be sent, how to monitor it via network admin tools such as HP Arcsight, how to deploy additional virtual appliances in a VMware ESX environment, etc.
The separation of duties carries over to the Web-based interfaces used to manage the Vordel Application Gateway. In the case of the person managing APIs and policies, they see dashboards such as the one shown above. Here I see the traffic being passed to three APIs: CDYNE's EmailVerify service, SalesForce itself, and SalesForce's login service, for a two minute period on January 9th 2012.
In the screenshot above, we see what the Network Administrator sees. Rather than seeing information about SalesForce APIs, they instead see the network administration view of the Application Gateway. We see, for example, here the RAID Array Status for disks in the Application Gateway. Also, as you can see, system logs, networking, and server status can be monitored in this way. All of the same information can be sent to a product like HP Arcsight so that the network administrator does not even need to look at Vordel tooling.In summary, there are two distinct types of people who manage Application Gateways on an ongoing basis, and this maps to Vordel's two distinct training courses, and to the different Web interfaces we provide for these people. All of this is geared towards moving application integration application security out of applications and onto the network (virtual or physical).
