Keeping Up with RightAngle

RightAngle has several critical processes necessary to maintain regular business. Keeping up with the Kardashians is an easier task than keeping up with what’s going on in RightAngle sometimes. The system has components spread across different technologies, custom and core processes, and often external inputs which drive the action throughout the day. Trying to manage all of these can be a challenge. Below we’ll highlight a few of the critical areas you need to be watching to make sure your environment is serving the business. Keeping an eye on these will allow your team to be aware of issues before they impact your users.

‍

Scheduled Tasks

The obvious and often most critical piece of your RightAngle environment is the set of scheduled tasks you have established in the .NET version of the application. These tasks are expected to run regularly and on-time. The bulk of them process accounting data, deliver fresh risk data, and keep data flowing through the system. Critical failures of these can result in real financial impacts when your team is making decisions on out-of-date data or lost with missing pieces of information (seeing Chi West, North West, Psalm West, and Saint West can really hurt the internal compass). Keeping an eye on the Task Scheduler and Event Logs produced by RightAngle is critical to keeping the business going. 

‍

RAMQ Jobs

If you happen to be on a RightAngle version prior to S17, you likely have activity like the .NET Scheduled Tasks running on your RAMQs via Messaging Maintenance jobs. Like their counterparts in .NET, these are processes critical to keeping business data processing throughout the day. Being on the lookout for failures in your RAMQ Log is even more critical than watching the .NET processes as the PowerBuilder version of RightAngle is known to have breakdowns like Kim’s soon to be ex-husband Kanye (large and problematic!). The most common problem is the checkout status of the processes when they do fail, like when Kim checks out of reality. These situations can sometimes fail silently, leaving your business exposed until someone in the business finally realizes there’s a problem. 

‍

Service Monitors and RAMQ Services

The Task Scheduler and Messaging Maintenance windows are simply interfaces for scheduling the processes which need to happen. The actual work is completed by Windows Services installed to consume and process those messages (similar to Kris doing the actual work to keep this family together). This is in the form of Service Monitors for .NET and RAMQ Services for the PowerBuilder side of RightAngle. It goes without saying, but ensuring these services are running properly is paramount to keeping your data flowing. If these go down, your team needs to know fast to get them back up. The impact can be a total halt in your business operations in RightAngle, an outcome which is expensive and causes users to lose faith in the system. 

‍

External Feeds

The final area we recommend monitoring is your external feeds. It is common for external sources to bring in data to RightAngle. Often it is in the form of an inbound interface which is running from RightAngle in the Task Scheduler or Messaging Maintenance out to the external source to go gather the data. In other scenarios, the outside source is pushing the data into RightAngle without a task in the system involved. Those processes are very susceptible to failure without notice. Since the action is occurring outside of the RightAngle system, it is harder to keep a beat on the status of those activities. Providing your team a means to watch those external feeds is important to keeping the data flowing. 

‍

A Better Way

This may sound like a lot for a person or team to watch. It is. Thankfully, there is a better way to monitor this information for your team to consume easily (even easier than watching a weekly reality show detailing it all). Triangle Software has developed the RA Support Monitor to continually gather this data, deliver it into an easy-to-use interface, and bring alerts to your team when something breaks down. Remove the human error, the doubt, and the constant refreshing by letting technology do the watching. RA Support Monitor is tailored to keep up with RightAngle. Let’s connect so you can free up your team to keep up with the Kardashians.