ZXTM Control API Overview and Reference 

Version 4.0

subsequent failure, more standby servers are available to take up the 

load. This ensures that there is no single point of failure in the system. 

ZXTM incorporates a centralised web based administration console that 

monitors and manages each traffic management unit in your service 

infrastructure. It can be deployed on Linux (x86, x86_64, IA64), 

FreeBSD (x86) and Solaris (SPARC, x86, x86_64). 

1.2  Introducing the Control API 

A cluster of ZXTM machines is normally managed using the web based 

Admin Server on one of the machines. 

ZXTM's Control API provides an alternative means to remotely administer 

and configure a ZXTM cluster.  For example, when an Intrusion Detection 

System detects a remote attack attempt, it could use the ZXTM Control 

API to configure the ZXTM cluster to drop all connections from the 

suspect IP address.   

A provisioning system could detect server overloading by monitoring the 

response times of the server nodes using ZXTM's Service Level 

Monitoring capability and the SNMP interface.  Once it had provisioned 

additional servers, it could then inform ZXTM by reconfiguring the server 

pools using the ZXTM Control API. 

1.2.1  Standards conformant SOAP communications 

The Control API is a standards conformant SOAP based API that provides 

the means for other applications to query and modify the configuration of 

the cluster. 

SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a 

decentralized, distributed environment.  It is an XML based 

protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a 

framework for describing what is in a message and how to process 

it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application 

defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote 

procedure calls and responses. 

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), w3.org 

Most importantly, SOAP is a commonly accepted standard that allows 

applications to communicate.  ZXTM's Control API is published in the 

form  of  WSDL  (Web  Services  Description  Language)  files.    These  files 

document which methods (remote procedure calls) are available, what 

input parameters they take and the output they return. 

The WSDL files are located in ZEUSHOME/zxtm/etc/wsdl. 

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