Cases in Pega Diagnostic Center

Pega Platform provides PDC with various types of information, such as alerts, exceptions, and performance statistics. PDC displays these events as data points in charts and tables.

PDC supports the following types of events:

• Alerts – Messages that Pega Platform generates to report performance and security issues.
• Exceptions – Errors that interrupt the operation of your application. Pega Platform includes exceptions in the PegaRULES log file, which PDC interprets to identify specific issues.
• Insights – Observations that PDC makes based on activities and changes in your system, which help you diagnose and resolve issues. These events are different from alerts and exceptions because they provide additional information that is the result of a synthetic analysis of your system.

Events gather a wide range of data, such as session descriptions, stack frame lists, clipboard parameter page data, and the Performance Analysis (PAL) counters of a session at the time of an event. PDC receives this data and then stores it as records in a database. 

PDC detects a large number of events. Some urgent events, such as stability issues, require immediate attention and provide optional notifications for each occurrence. However, most events do not represent a severe problem unless they appear in large quantities.

To help you manage events, PDC creates cases. A PDC agent evaluates all the events in your application since the agent last ran, and then groups the events that resulted from the same issue. Such a grouping by issue is called a correlation. PDC correlates events to create cases that represent specific issues. For example, to correlate a slow query alert with the appropriate case, PDC identifies both the query and the rule that defines the query. To correlate exceptions that originate from the same part of your application, PDC determines the class in which each exception occurred, and then parses the exception messages.

If PDC does not find any cases from a specific correlation, it creates a new case with a type that identifies the problem, and then updates the case when additional events from the same correlation occur.

To help illustrate potential issues and relationships between specific events, PDC aggregates the events into cases based on the following properties:

• Origin of the events
• Characteristics of each event
• Common properties

You can check the cases to which PDC assigned an event by going to the Event Viewer and filtering the specific events by Case ID. To see all events assigned to a case, group by Event Type.

PDC creates cases that contain the following types of information: 

• Performance insights that highlight PEGA, SECU, and ROBO events. Performance insights do not always represent a problem and can show potential areas of improvement as well.
• Cases based on exceptions that highlight OPS, DBMS, SMTP, and INTG events, and any unhandled exception that PDC detects in your application. Each case that PDC creates from an exception is a potential problem.

Performance insight cases

A performance insight case does not always represent a problem. It can also inform you about the performance of your applications and suggest improvement opportunities. The interpretation of each case depends on the context. For example, your application contains a report that fetches query statistics and is available in several places. During a single day, 150 operators generate the same report, but for 100 operators the report is very slow or returns errors.

Check your knowledge with the following interactions:

On the Overview tab of each case, you can find information to help you understand the severity and frequency of the problem. To help you analyze the issue, PDC gives you context for each case.

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about each area of the Overview tab:

PDC periodically updates each case with the following information:

• First event
• Last event
• Alert origins
• Current and previous week statistics
• Recommended next steps
• Urgency

You can perform the following actions on a case:

• Refresh - Multiple users can manage the same case simultaneously. Use the refresh function to see the current status of a case, for example, to whom it is assigned, the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) value, and the case status.
• Copy shareable link - Generate a direct link to the case. You can share the link with other users who might help analyze the issue.
• Ignore - If the issue is insignificant and the information about it should not be processed by PDC, you can configure PDC to ignore the case. However, it is not a good practice to ignore any cases.
• Reassign - If you know the right person or group of people that should be working on fixing the issue, you can reassign the case.
• Regenerate advice - The information on the Overview tab in the case is periodically updated. To see the newest data, refresh the case information.
• Elevate metric - Elevate the metric threshold on a case from the default that is specified for that case type. PDC discards all events that are below the specified threshold. PDC does this automatically for certain types of extremely large cases. For information, see Automatic reduction of alerts for extremely large cases.
• Update tracking references - Enter or change the information that you can use to track case resolution in a project management tool, for example, Agile Studio or Jira.
• Follow - Follow individual cases to track changes.
• Tag - Create custom tags to organize similar cases and track them on the Tags landing page.