Troubleshooting errors during development
Pega Diagnostic Center (PDC) is a powerful tool that developers can use to monitor, diagnose, and improve their Pega Platform™ applications. During the development of an application, PDC helps ensure that new features and functionalities are optimally developed and tested.
This topic assumes that you are already familiar with certain concepts. For relevant training materials about the concepts covered in this topic, see the Pega Diagnostic Center explained module.
There are several client personas or roles that should use PDC as part of the application development lifecycle process. As a developer, explore how you can use PDC to monitor, diagnose, and improve Pega applications.
You can use PDC to monitor individual features and screens and provide feedback on how well these new functions work. As you develop applications, you can verify whether you are introducing performance issues or bugs. In the pre-production phase, PDC helps you efficiently design and test your Pega applications by providing application metrics during development.
By reviewing PDC on a regular basis in your development environment, you can use these metrics to determine whether code changes have introduced new issues and whether changes to the system have impacted application performance. This topic describes how you can use PDC to find and address new issues.
Setting up the system baseline
The first step in using PDC to test an application in development is to set the system baseline. You want to be able to tell whether the changes you make to the application affect the performance of the application or whether changes introduce new issues, so you should first have a measurement to define where you started. The following process describes how you, as the developer, can use PDC to set the baseline:
1. Identify relevant IDs
Determine your requestor ID or the node ID of the development system where your code will run. This ID helps you focus on relevant exceptions.
For the second set of tests, you can filter PDC data by your Operator ID. However, because exceptions often occur at the system level and an operator ID might not be captured at the time of the exception, you need the node ID.
2. Access Event Viewer in PDC
Open the Event Viewer in PDC and look at the current issues in the development environment.
In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the Event Viewer in PDC:
For more information, see Event Viewer landing page.
3. Review exceptions
Check in your code and manually run your new feature, and then quickly go into PDC to review the results. Select a time range of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour to capture any errors resulting from the new feature.
You can use the Filter feature in Event Viewer to filter by Type and select Exception items. You might need to further filter by your Operator ID or, if that is not useful, by your Requestor ID or Node ID.
4. Analyze and debug exceptions
For each exception, use PDC to determine the cause of the event and make necessary code changes to address the cause:
- Expand the exception and use the Stack traces tab to debug your application.
There might be multiple exceptions from one issue. - Sort by event name to see if all exceptions are from a similar error.
PDC can help you identify where debugging one error may resolve multiple exceptions. - You might be unable to debug all exceptions immediately.
Consider entering some into your bug-tracking system or marking some as deferred.
The following figure shows the Event Viewer table with an error event with details and stack traces:
5. Repeat until no new exceptions are found
Repeat the cycle of running the new feature, checking PDC, and addressing any issues you find until you no longer see new exceptions when you manually run the tests.
After no new exceptions are found, you should perform unit tests, and then use PDC again to determine whether the new code or application changes have solved some of the outstanding issues, or whether testing has uncovered new issues.
When you have addressed all the exception errors found by PDC, either by fixing them or marking them as deferred Known Issues, you now have a system baseline and can measure the effect of your ongoing code or application changes against it, as shown in the following diagram:
Checking for new errors after an update
When you check in your code for Milestone 2, or any subsequent Milestone, you should still use PDC and follow the same process to check for new errors. However, since you have already established a baseline, all you need to do is track the new errors that have occurred since you defined that baseline.
For the milestones after the first, you should use a different tool to track issues caused by the newly uploaded code: the Update Assessment in PDC.
As a developer, follow these steps to assess your update:
- Open the Update Assessment landing page, and then select the update that includes your new code.
The Update Assessment landing page displays all the new issues reported by PDC since this update. Begin by addressing these new issues. - Expand the Case to view the events that occurred.
PDC displays all events that appeared after the update. - Open the Case, and then expand the How was this case created? section to begin troubleshooting.
- Review the event information related to the issue to find a starting point for your troubleshooting.
The Update Assessment landing page also includes two additional tabs, as shown in the following figure: Less frequent and More frequent.
- The Less frequent tab displays existing issues that have decreased in frequency since your update.
- The More frequent tab displays existing issues that have increased in frequency. Review these issues to understand the impact of the update.
Key takeaways
When troubleshooting errors in your code, begin by using the Event Viewer to identify and address exception errors. This process helps you establish a baseline.
For each new milestone build, review the Update Assessment tool to identify and resolve any new issues introduced by recent changes.
This process focuses on fixing the exception errors found in your code as you develop your application.
- Use PDC for proactive error management: Learn how to use PDC throughout development to identify and address errors in your Pega application proactively.
- Set a clear baseline: Grasp the importance of establishing a baseline using PDC to measure your application's performance and identify any initial errors.
- Troubleshoot exceptions effectively: Discover how to pinpoint exceptions caused by your code and effectively debug them using Event Viewer in PDC and stack traces.
- Manage errors efficiently with the Update Assessment tool: Explore how the Update Assessment tool simplifies troubleshooting in later development milestones by highlighting newly introduced issues.
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