Application and system updates
Pega Diagnostic Center (PDC) provides real-time and historical data for changes and updates to your system. Use PDC for change management during the development life cycle and to see the effects of moving your application into a new environment, such as from staging to production. After a change or update, you can evaluate the impact on your system's performance and detect potential issues.
You can use the following PDC features to view and assess application and system updates:
- Change History: You can use the Change History landing page to identify all the changes and application and system updates during the last 60 days.
- Update Assessment: You can use the Update Assessment landing page to correlate changes in cases that PDC creates with specific update packages from the last 12 days.
- Improvement Plan - TOP5 History: You can use the Improvement Plan - TOP5 History landing page to see whether the changes correlate with cases. You can compare imported files or Pega Platform™ updates to the top cases over the past three months.
- Event Distribution: PDC creates cases that include one or more events. The Event Distribution tab sometimes includes information that allows you to compare events to recent changes to applications and Pega Platform. You can see whether the events in the case correspond with those changes.
Viewing a list of changes and updates
The Change History landing page displays packages that you import into your system manually or through the Deployment Manager, sorted from newest to oldest. The name of the update consists of the date and time of the update and the name of the package imported to Pega Platform. You can select a specific update to see the detailed metrics.
The Change History uses the following categories to organize the changes system:
- Application imports.
- Deployments with Deployment Manager (version 5.5 or higher).
- Dynamic system settings associated with Pega Platform.
- Configuration settings (the prconfig.xml file, Data-Admin-System-Settings, PRBootstrapProperties).
- Rule updates (up to the first 50 rule updates).
- Hotfixes installed as of the most recent hotfix scan.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the Change History landing page:
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Assessing the impact of updates
The Update Assessment landing page highlights differences in case frequency in a monitored system after recent Pega Platform updates. Update Assessment highlights cases that illustrate ongoing or potential stability issues in your system. For each package, you can see new cases, cases that increased in frequency, and cases that decreased in frequency. You can use the page to assess the impact that the updates have on your system and to correlate changes in cases that PDC creates with specific update packages.
You can use Update Assessment as a quality control tool for every Pega Platform application that you develop. PDC highlights the most important new issues with the NEEDS REVIEW tag. Always analyze those issues first and immediately resolve any impactful exceptions. An increase in case frequency might be related to increased user traffic and does not always signify an issue, but you should analyze the increase to exclude a possible problem.
Compare differences in case frequency after every import to accurately assess whether the update introduced or solved any issues. Although not every issue is equally important, as a best practice, you should address less significant issues after each update so that they do not overshadow the more important problems.
If you need to see a more comprehensive and detailed list of all updates from the last 60 days, use the Change History landing page. Use the Update Assessment landing page to analyze the impact of updates on your application from the last 12 days.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the Update Assessment landing page:
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Comparing the history of Improvement Plan cases to changes and updates
The Improvement Plan - TOP5 History landing page displays the historical values for TOP5 metrics the system saves daily at 00:00 GMT.
The one-month and three-month time interval views for the Improvement Plan - TOP5 History landing page include vertical lines that show application changes or Pega Platform updates. You can use this information to see whether updates correlate with TOP5 cases.
Correlating cases to changes and updates
When PDC creates a case for one or more events, the Event Distribution tab includes vertical lines that show when a stakeholder in your organization, such as a developer or system administrator, changed an application or applied Pega Platform updates. By comparing events in the chart to recent updates on the tab, you can see whether your application changes or Pega Platform updates correlate with cases. Each update on the tab includes a direct link to the Update Assessment landing page.
In the following figure, click the + icons to learn more about the Event Distribution tab:
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