Web Service Monitoring

[gsbrown]

What are some best practices used to monitor web service "uptime"?

We are new to RTI/SOA web service usage in DataStage and we aren't sure how to best go about keeping our eyes on the activity and performance of the RTI services around the clock.

An issue we are running into that we'd like to catch is occassionally a service will freeze and only seed "time out waiting for response" messages to the end user. I'd like to know some best practice ways to catch when this starts happening and a programmer can immediately address the issue.