STAR Transport STRONGLY RECOMMENDS that reasonable and prudent Administration, Monitoring and Diagnostic measures be applied to EndPoint Gateways involved in STAR messaging.

STAR Transport STRONGLY RECOMMENDS the use of NTP for all participating systems. Use of Simple NTP (SNTP) is allowed. Public NTP servers MUST meet the NIST Time and Frequency Services standard. (Ref http://pool.ntp.org)

STAR Transport REQUIRES that all Timestamp data elements used at the Transport level (which includes all SOAP Header elements) MUST use XML Schema datetime format with values that are UTC codes.

Implementations of ebMS SHOULD support Ping/Pong. It is strongly RECOMMENDED that Ping/Pong messages are digitally signed. Receivers SHOULD reply to a Ping with Pong unless the message sender cannot be authenticated or the message is determined to be part of a denial of service attack. With ebMS over SMTP, however, the ping/pong latency may be longer than is useful.

Web Services Management is an area that is evolving as more real world Web Services implementations are being rolled out. A key distinction to be aware of is the difference between how you manage Web Services versus using Web Services to manage systems in a manner similar to SNMP.

There are several proposals and individual vendors promoting management of Web Services. The OASIS Web Services Distributed Management technical committee is an effort to define standards in this area. The WSDM is working on both Management of Web Services and Management Using Web Services.

STAR will follow progress in this area and may make recommendations in future releases of this guideline.

STAR systems MUST be able to log message metadata and key fields as described in Auditing Decisions section. STAR RECOMMENDS that this logging is done for all messages, but may only be used when needed to gather debugging information.