Pega Diagnostic Center introduction

Pega Infinity is a comprehensive suite of CRM applications and intelligent automation tools that enable rapid development and deployment of sophisticated enterprise applications. The design of PDC supports and enhances the functionality of Pega Infinity by providing a unified approach to application monitoring and maintenance.

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the key features of PDC:

PDC is feature-rich and may seem overwhelming at first. However, Pega Diagnostic Center explained introduces you to the essential features and provides a starting point for effective use.

Responsibility in the development cycle

PDC improves application quality during all stages of design, development, testing, and production so that you can:

• Design the application in an optimal way to use fewer resources and reduce failures.
• Enforce quality gates before transitioning to a higher environment.
• Create baselines and correlate them with every update to identify regressions. For more information, see Setting the system baseline.

While PDC provides powerful tools for monitoring and troubleshooting, it is ultimately your responsibility to develop, monitor, and maintain your Pega applications.

Proactive monitoring

You can use PDC for troubleshooting. However, as a best practice, use PDC for proactive monitoring to prevent issues before they become critical. These actions include:

• Tracking metrics and graphs: Use the data provided by PDC to understand and improve the internal state of applications.
• Identifying potential issues: Detect problems, for example, performance degradation or poorly written reports early, to prevent disruptions during peak usage.

For more information, see Monitoring your system.

PDC collects, parses, and aggregates monitoring data without user involvement. The data that PDC displays provides an in-depth view of issues and events in your system. This helps you increase the control over how your applications operate, and helps you remove errors.

To ensure privacy, PDC does not store, process, or accept Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or other sensitive data, except for usernames. If usernames are sensitive, for example, if you use email addresses as usernames, PDC can encrypt them by using operator ID encryption.

PDC collects only diagnostic data and metadata on how the application performs. All data traffic is one-directional; your application sends data to PDC, but PDC does not communicate back with your application.

To learn more about the data that PDC processes, see Data processing.

To learn more about data security and to further secure your data, see Pega Cloud Security and data protection.
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You can build or customize powerful Pega applications by following a best-practices software development lifecycle (SDLC).

As with any good application lifecycle, organizations must always confirm that non-feature-related aspects of their applications, such as performance and stability, are carefully evaluated.

For more information about the best practices for each phase of the SDLC using PDC, see Use cases of Pega Diagnostic Center.

Here are the key takeaways for using PDC to manage your Pega applications:

• PDC is a comprehensive Pega application performance monitoring and improvement tool. Unlike generic monitoring tools, PDC offers a Pega-specific view, including troubleshooting and performance data.
• PDC is secure and does not use PII. PDC prioritizes privacy by not storing or processing sensitive data, while collecting only diagnostic data and metadata for application performance analysis.
• PDC is included with your Pega license and should be your go-to tool for managing Pega applications. It can be used throughout the development lifecycle, from testing to deployment and ongoing monitoring.
• Move beyond just troubleshooting with PDC. Proactive monitoring helps identify and address potential issues before they become critical, saving time and money.

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