Pega Diagnostic Center (PDC)

The following figure shows the Event Viewer landing page. The Event Viewer provides a live feed of log data for events that occur in every node of your system in near real time and displays all events that PDC recognizes. PDC organizes related events into cases that are linked in the Case ID column. This landing page is just one example of how PDC provides information on alerts, events, and performance issues for your applications that are built using Pega Platform.

You can use the detailed information on the PDC landing pages to receive insights into Pega Platform applications at run time, including:

• The conditions in which applications run.
• Bottlenecks in performance, resource usage, scalability issues.
• Patterns and correlations in these events that often uncover seasonal behaviors or other usage patterns that can adversely affect your application.

You use PDC to monitor and troubleshoot applications built using Pega Platform.

PDC operates on artifacts, such as rule names, and provides reports that simplify the troubleshooting process. PDC uses the out-of-the-box instrumentation of Pega Platform to provide deep visibility into your applications, unlike what is possible with third-party application performance management (APM) or telemetry solutions. 

With PDC, you can draw conclusions about performance issues. PDC aggregates repetitive performance events and warnings based on shared characteristics (origin, pattern, rule name) and creates cases. PDC uses cases for prioritization and high-level problem assessment for non-immediate issues.

The following figure shows the Improvement Plan - TOP5 landing page. The Improvement Plan displays the cases with the highest impact. You can use the Improvement Plan to view detailed information about issues that affect the performance of your monitored system. By grouping the most impactful cases into categories, the Improvement Plan improves the visibility of the issues and helps you to ensure the smooth functioning of your system.

PDC provides a number of benefits through monitoring and analyzing Pega Platform applications, including:

• Improving application quality throughout the development cycle
• Preparing you for growth
• Providing notifications and engagement for issues in Pega Platform
• Monitoring nodes and clusters for on-premises deployments

Improving application quality throughout the development cycle

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

• Design your 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 on every update to identify regressions.

Pega Express™ is a light, design-focused delivery approach that combines Pega's low-code experience, best practices in application development, and Scrum methodology to quickly deliver meaningful outcomes. PDC supports Pega Express as well as more traditional development approaches.

Preparing you for growth

PDC helps you to prepare for growth by identifying scalability issues that depend on volume. For example, the Improvement Plan provides categories that can help identify scalability issues. PDC provides landing pages for System Resources and Background Processing.
 
By analyzing the System Resources and Background Processing landing pages in Pega Diagnostic Center, you can check and optimize background processing performance in your system. By using the background processing capabilities in Pega Platform you can offload tasks to help improve throughput and efficiency. By running tasks in the background, you improve system scalability and performance, and users can continue working on a case or other work.

Providing notifications and engagement for issues in Pega Platform

PDC provides notifications for events that require immediate attention. You use event subscriptions to automatically notify appropriate parties of issues and use predefined daily digest notifications to provide information for more than 100 components in Pega Platform. You can keep all or specific users up to date with a complete Improvement Plan, a list of the five most urgent items from various affected areas, a periodic digest of new cases, and event-based notifications. For more information about configuring notifications, see Managing notifications in Pega Diagnostic Center and List of events and notifications in Pega Diagnostic Center.

Monitoring nodes and clusters for on-premises deployments

PDC provides cluster-level monitoring for on-premises deployments. You can monitor the health and status of individual nodes in a Pega cluster. For example, the Event Viewer landing page provides information on events that were caused by specific nodes, and the System Resources > Nodes landing page provides usage statistics for the nodes in your system.