SOA/BPM performance best practices (Addressing complex environments)

Except for maybe simple proof-of-concept proof-of-technology, or demo setups, today's real life business process automation environments are complex.
Complexity often goes along with a variety of different ways to look at it. Some of these views may provide overlapping contents, some others might be disjunct and perhaps also orthogonal to other views.
Having a SOA environment suggests to look at the SOA reference architecture[1], when considering performance related questions in architecture reviews.

Having this architecture chart in mind can help in assessing a solution's performance behaviour or when doing performance problem determination, but usually diagrams on operational topology and application architecture pro­vide much better assistance. Such charts show, how all the involved components are connected and allow to depict, how requests are flowing through the system.

So - whenever you have to troubleshoot performance problems - especially in an unknown environment - make sure you get the charts/pictures that help you understand, how things look like and how they relate to each other. This material also helps a lot in communicating with e.g. system support personnel.