Tracking mechanism enables tracking of input message and message processing at various stages, which often span across multiple services.

Logging mechanism is a general logging feature of any SOA service implementation, which is unified so that all services log in a given SOA standard.

Error handling mechanism deals with error logging, related severity, priority, and handling of error in terms of reporting or retrying/correction. Error reporting may include monitoring and alerting services.

Some of the attributes that help facilitate these mechanisms may include the following:

• Log Levels (uniform log levels for all implementations)
• Timestamp (includes time zones for global enterprise)
• RequestID (GUID generated by the Sender/Client application to track the transactional flow)
• TrackingID (GUID generated to keep track of message flow)
• BusinessUnits (inserted by the Application)
• DomainID, ApplicationID, ModuleName (these are pre-defined values, perhaps in SOA services library)
• ServiceStep (used by Mediation / Orchestration)
• BusinessKey (context sensitive info for a message or a set of related messages)
• RetryCount (retries indicator if error retry/correction is activated)
• MessageType (Pre-defined values to identify the type of a business message)
• Message (could be short message and a full message)
• Description (useful for logging)