Software systems participating in automated STAR message exchanges will be developed with different architectures. To increase dependability of industry communications, STAR Transport applications should employ Management facilities that allow for the administration and monitoring the health of endpoint gateways and related services and implement diagnostic systems which assist troubleshooting and enable preventative maintenance.

Corporations have been employing features such as SNMP to monitor hardware and network devices for years. There has been less standardization in the monitoring of software applications.

ebMS provides a Ping/Pong feature that can be used to monitor status of remote partner endpoint gateways. It is allows an end point to determine the availability of a partner’s web ser vice.

A promising, but nascent standard is evolving within the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management technical committee, attempting to standardize management of software/hardware via Web Services and to standardize the management of Web Services themselves.