Building blocks of Pega Diagnostic Center

Pega applications are extremely powerful and complex, with numerous features and layers of functionality. To help you manage potential issues, Pega Platform includes various tools that monitor applications at runtime and generate alerts when specific conditions occur.

Types of alerts

• Performance alerts (PEGA): There are over 130 performance alerts defined in Pega Platform. These alerts help protect the system and users from issues like poorly designed reports that retrieve millions of records, potentially slowing down the application and overloading the system’s memory.
• Security alerts (SECU): Security alerts have a predefined structure and contain information about important security issues. Applications generate these alerts when a Pega Platform server is at risk, for example, when someone attempts to hijack a user session.
• Robotics alerts (ROBO): Robot manager alerts inform about performance issues with the robots, for example, when a robot loses connectivity.

You can view these alerts in the Pega log files in Dev Studio. Security alerts are found in the Alert Security log, while performance and other alerts are found in the Alert log.

For more information about alerts, see the Alerts documentation.

In the following image, click the + icon to see the different type of alert logs available for download:

In addition to alerts, Pega Platform also generates exceptions that interrupt the operation of your application. These exceptions are identified as EXCP0001 and are captured as Java exceptions with long stack traces.

Handling alerts and exceptions

Alerts and exceptions captured in the log files are crucial as they can indicate vital issues. However, they can also generate thousands of messages, especially if minor issues occur frequently.

To manage this, you use Pega Diagnostic Center, which captures all these alerts and turns them into events.

In Pega Alert logs, there is only one exception number, EXCP0001, covering all exceptions. PDC filters these exceptions and creates additional types of alert events, for example:

• Database alerts (DBMS)
• Operations alerts (OPS)
• Integration alerts (INTG)
• SMTP alerts
• Data migration pipeline alerts (DMP)

These additional alert types generated by exceptions are created only in PDC and do not appear in the Pega Alert logs. In the Alert log, you will only see the EXCP message.

For a full list of events displayed in PDC, see the List of events and notifications in the PDC documentation.

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about how Pega alerts are displayed in PDC:

A case is a grouping of events that result from the same issue. Every few minutes, PDC evaluates all events in an application and correlates the events that result from the same issue into a case. For example, to correlate a slow query alert with the appropriate case, PDC identifies the query and the rule that defines the query. To correlate exceptions that originate from the same part of the application, PDC determines the class in which each exception occurred and then parses the exception messages.

For each event, PDC determines if it matches an existing case. If PDC does not find any cases from a specific correlation, it creates a new case with a type that identifies the problem and updates the case when additional events from the same correlation occur. The case also displays whether this issue was seen in other systems to determine the extent of the problem.

Much of the PDC functionality is based on either events or cases. For example, if you look at the PDC Scores page, the measurements for the recommendations there are based on events.

For more information about cases, see Cases in PDC.

For more information about events, see Events in PDC.

Another crucial function of PDC is monitoring application health. Pega Platform applications often connect to various databases, legacy systems, and services such as Search, and usually run on multiple nodes. They also use many configuration settings affecting various aspects, from HTTP settings and authentication to caching and indexing.

Information about these lower-level processes is available in Pega Platform, but you must have rights and privileges for Admin Studio to access that information. These rights and privileges enable you to take actions, such as changing the value of a configuration setting. In addition, there are a number of background processes that run in Pega Platform applications, for example, agents, queue processors, and listeners. This information is also available in Admin Studio, but again, you must be granted access. If you are granted access, you can perform actions such as stopping and restarting agents.

Background processing

The same data for system information and background processes is displayed in PDC and is visible to all. The data in PDC is read-only, which provides useful information to PDC users while protecting the application from inappropriate changes. The background processing functionality in PDC enables you to view information about agents and agent queues, job schedulers, listeners, and queue processors. Clients can use their Dashboard landing page to view whether the agents, listeners, and queue processors are running, broken, or disabled, across all their systems. Clicking on one of these items shows the background processing for that item.

For more information about background processing, see Background Processing in PDC.

System resources

PDC also provides system resources information, including:

• Database metrics and database table information. For more information, see the Database landing page in PDC.
• A list of nodes in the system and their status. For more information, see the Nodes landing page in PDC.
• Resource usage, including CPU usage, heap usage, and requestor usage. For more information, see the Resource Utilization landing page in PDC.
• A list of the dynamic system settings (DSS). In this list, you can see what values are used for the configuration settings in your application. For more information, see the DSS List landing page in PDC.

PDC achieves the following results:

• Transforms alerts and exceptions into actionable events to monitor Pega applications.
• Organizes events into cases to streamline troubleshooting of application issues.
• Provides a central hub for system health data, including background processes, resource use, and configurations.
• Enables you to proactively identify and resolve Pega application issues.

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