Ensuring that transactions are executed successfully at every stage of the process is a vital part of your integration project. It is crucial that you are immediately made aware of any issues that occur within your business process. Monitoring will allow you to react accordingly and prevent big delays that would cost the business a lot of money.
With our latest release, you will get a peace of mind that exceptions handled by the Atomic Scope blocks will trigger an immediate notification to the relevant people. You will no longer need to write any custom code or manually verify if your transactions are completing successfully.
SMTP Settings
It is essential you have configured SMTP settings of the server that you wish to use to send email alerts. Head over to the Settings section of Atomic Scope and open Application Settings from the sub-menu.
Once you enable SMTP, you will need to fill few standard parameters which you can find from your SMTP service provider, e.g. Office365 SMTP.
The credentials you can either enable “use default credentials” which will authorise against your local SMTP server using the credentials of the user that runs the host instance. Alternatively, provide full username and password in case of external SMTP server such as Office365.
You can read more about SMTP configuration in our documentation
Creating an Alert
To begin monitoring your business process for exceptions, head over to the Business Process configuration page of Atomic Scope. Next, choose the process that you want to monitor and click on it to open configuration mode. At the top two tabs select “Alert”, which will reveal the Alert Configuration page.
There is a total of three sections which you need to populate, to make the product aware that it needs to trigger an alert of an exception:
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- Exception Alerts – this is a basic trigger that enables exception monitoring for the current business process.
- Restrictions – allow you to limit the number of emails you receive in case of multiple exceptions; e.g. in the case of x number of messages with unexpected format or value.
- Notification Channels – here you can provide a list of email addresses that will receive the alert notification.
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To enable alerts, you need to toggle the first section of the configuration and provide at least one email address. Exception logged through the Atomic Scope exception block will trigger an email to the people on the notification channel list.
Restrictions
Restrictions allow you to control the number of alerts that will be sent out when you receive multiple numbers of corrupted messages. In such cases, you don’t want to overload your response team’s mailbox, but send enough that they understand the severity of the case. Let us look at the available options:
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- Max Number of Alerts – Once Atomic Scope reaches the specified limit, it will stop any further notifications for that business process.
- Frequency – Time window evaluated by the max number of alerts; e.g. you have configured a maximum of 10 alerts and frequency to 5 minutes, every time Atomic Scope evaluates the alert, it will check how many alerts were sent out in the last 5 minutes. If the number of alerts is less than 10, then the alert will be triggered, otherwise, the alert will be skipped.
- Per Exception Type – By default, with this option Disabled the maximum number of alerts apply for the entire business process, with this option Enabled, the alert limit is checked against two of our exceptions: “Business Exception” and “System Exception”, thus with the same above we can get 10 alerts per exception type within 5 minutes period.
- Per Transaction – As the name suggests, this will apply the restriction on the transaction level instead of the business process.
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We tried to make this configuration as simple as possible, with enough options to fit most scenarios. If you still find it hard to understand, it is all explained in more detail in our documentation. Additionally, at the bottom of the section, there is dynamic descriptive text explaining how the restriction will function.
Monitoring Alerts
With the monitoring fully configured, atomic scope will start sending out alerts to your mailbox. What can you expect to receive?
The title of the email will be in the following format:
Exception Alert in { Workspace Name } – { Business Process Name }
The email body will contain all the search properties which you can use to query the transaction in the portal. The alert also contains exception body, so you can notify relevant people to take action.
Our team is looking forward to your feedback, so please leave us a comment below. To check out all the new features in our 2.0 release please click here.