The RightAngle Snapshot Murder Mystery

If you own RightAngle, you have likely run into a scenario where a change in the system resulted in some major problems. Maybe a fat-fingered date on an order crashed your snapshot. Someone added an extra zero to a price, and values are in the quintillions. One way or another a user action resulted in massive system failure. Knowing who did it is important to helping the user learn to avoid these mistakes, but even more important to a quick recovery is knowing what the data was before the change. Let’s look at ways to solve your murder mysteries within RightAngle. 

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Gather the Evidence

The easiest way to understand what happened in the system and who was involved is to start gathering the evidence. RightAngle offers a built-in audit framework via the Audit Maintenance windows in .NET. You must turn these on for various entities to gather the change data involved. We recommend enabling it for all the major entities such as deals, locations, price curves, order, movements, and any other pertinent items you might want to track. Enabling these allows the harvest and storage of data about when an entity changed, what was changed, who changed it, and what the value was beforehand. Gathering these artifacts is paramount to solving the case.

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Build the Story

You’ve found all the pieces. Now we must build the timeline. It may sound easy with the data I mentioned above, but it is harder than you think. The RightAngle reports to view this audit data are often convoluted, showing IDs instead of translated values, and they don’t easily show you what values were before. You have to know what is causing your problem (e.g., a bad date on the Order). You have to know what it was before it was changed by sifting through the audit data captured above. And you finally need to know who changed it to this broken value and when. After finding and lining up the data into a logical timeline, you can begin to tell the story of how you got here. This is the challenge in these mysteries, piecing it all together. It takes time, skill, and often patience. 

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Reviving the Victim

So, you’ve figured it out: Sally Scheduler with the Order Actualizer in the Scheduling Workbench. The crime, the victim, and the murder weapon used to kill your snapshot. Now that you know the details of the story, it is time to perform CPR on the victim. Each scenario varies, but hopefully, this information empowers your support team to fix the problem. In the case of a bad order date tanking the snapshot, you likely had to unwind the changes on the Order, purge the original snapshot, and fire off a fresh run. You might even have to alter some RiskMessages or SnapshotMessages to fix the data for good. 

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Triangle Can Help

While it can be fun to play Sherlock Holmes in RightAngle, it is much more likely to be frustrating, tiresome, and often challenging to solve these cases. We offer a better path. Triangle Software offers a ready-to-deploy custom Audit Report to view the evidence you gather in a logical manner which tells us who made the change, the previous state of the entity, and the current values. Having this data ready and available without the need to build the story or timeline saves valuable time when recovering from a failure due to user changes. Let’s connect and help you be the hero in the story!

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