Pega Diagnostic Center tools for Business Owners

The PDC Scores landing page categorizes performance and reliability metrics to provide actionable suggestions and the option to save reports as PDF files. It identifies errors in production environments that escape from lower environments. A tile represents each threshold that displays whether it has a PASS or FAIL status, along with recommended actions for improvement. The PDC Scores landing page contains the following three tabs with specific metrics and references to improve system performance and reliability:

• PDC Process Health: Best practices for PDC usage.
• Reliability: Helps in solving cases during the DevOps cycle.
• Performance: Measures interactions and response times, along with database growth.

Process health overview

Begin by reviewing the PDC Process Health tab, which provides an overview of the health of your application. It tracks various performance thresholds, for example, the number of urgent events and events during peak hour. It also displays Improvement Plan metrics and your application's adherence to best practices.

Reliability monitoring

Use the Reliability tab to see which systems are working. The Reliability tab displays behaviors that help reduce functional service impacts and increase the reliability of your applications. If you notice a FAIL status, it indicates issues with components such as job schedulers or agents. The Recommended Action sections can help guide you through resolving these problems.

Performance insights

The Performance tab measures browser and service interactions and response times, along with database growth over the last 30 days. You can use it to track the average response times for user interactions. A high response time can indicate underlying issues that may require your attention.

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the PDC Scores landing page:

The Improvement Plan - TOP5 landing page in PDC provides insights into system performance issues. It categorizes impactful Cases by enhancing visibility and facilitating system management through sorting and filtering options. Key metrics include time and events, with automatic data refresh every 15 minutes and event resolution after 14 days of inactivity. Cases fall under one of the following categories: Database, Connectors, General Performance, Stability, Runtime Guardrails, Custom Cases, and Decisioning. PDC tracks each category with specific metrics to identify and address trouble areas.

You can regularly check the TOP5 report for the most impactful cases affecting your application. This gives you actionable insights into bottlenecks or performance hot spots. Evaluate each Case in terms of its impact on users, frequency of occurrence, and overall scope across your systems.

The TOP5 report can be further sorted by impact type:

• By Web: Web Cases are usually the most critical. Slow requests from web browsers mean that users are blocked and waiting for data to load.
• By Service: Service Cases block users when synchronous services deliver data, which happens in real time.
• By Background: Background impact Cases involve data that queue processors, job schedulers, and agents process asynchronously in the background. These Cases are not always as critical as web or service Cases.

If you select one of the tabs, the displayed Cases change. For example, some Database Cases might have background impact, so the Cases might also be displayed on the Background tab.

To prioritize your Cases, review the following details:

1. Consider the business impact. Focus on Cases that are highly visible or business critical.
2. Learn how the case corresponds to specific actions or data processing in the application, for example, information that the system displays, a feature, or background processing.
3. Sort the area of impact by web, service, or background to see how it affects end users.

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the Improvement Plan - TOP5 landing page:

Every Case on the Improvement Plan - TOP5 landing page represents a unique problem that PDC identifies, a performance bottleneck in an application or your system. You can use the Case Explorer to examine the details of each Case.

In the following image, click the + icons to see some of the Case details that are often important:

In the following image, notice that the EventsInTimeRange report has many events. It is listed as web impact, which means it has a direct effect on users and takes a lot of time.

The following process outlines the steps that you can take to ensure that critical issues like the EventsInTimeRange report are addressed in a timely manner, ultimately improving the performance and reliability of your systems:

1. Review the Improvement Plan - TOP5 report

• Schedule routine meetings to review the report with your Operations Engineer.
• Discuss each listed issue to determine whether it requires immediate attention, can go into the backlog for future resolution, or if it is low priority.

2. Assess impact

• Consider how the issue affects your users. Is it causing inconvenience or is it a blocker?
• Recognize that frequent report executions can consume valuable resources. Assess whether the benefits of fixing the issue justify the development team’s time and resources.

3. Analyze the scope of the issue

• Identify whether the EventsInTimeRange issue is isolated to one system or if it affects multiple systems.
• If the issue is present across multiple systems, it suggests that the impact on your operations is broader. This warrants higher resolution priority.

4. Monitor frequency and timeline

• Investigate how often the EventsInTimeRange report runs. Is it a daily, weekly, or monthly occurrence?
• If the report runs frequently, this might necessitate a higher priority for a fix due to its ongoing impact on performance and user experience.

5. Make informed decisions

• Based on the assessments from steps 2-4, decide whether to prioritize fixing the EventsInTimeRange report.
• If a fix is warranted, communicate your findings and the importance of the issue to the development team to ensure they understand the urgency.

6. Use holistic monitoring tools

• Keep an eye on the PDC Scores and Improvement Plan - TOP5 landing pages to maintain oversight of application performance.
• You can mitigate the risk of issues escalating and costing your company in terms of time and resources by staying informed with PDC.

The PDC Scores landing page offers a quick overview of key performance indicators, helping to identify areas for improvement. The Improvement Plan - TOP5 landing page highlights the most impactful performance bottlenecks. Collaboration with Operations Engineers is essential to prioritize and address the application issues identified by PDC.

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