System maintenance and monitoring

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System maintenance and monitoring

Overview

Maintenance and monitoring tasks are fundamental for a system to make sure the availability of information and adequate performance of that system.

By carrying out maintenance and administration tasks appropriately, you should be able to maximize a system's uptime, Automation Server included, and make sure appropriate performance, avoiding unplanned disruptions of the service to the end users.

 

Checklist

 

Within such maintenance and monitoring, there are tasks which serve different purposes. such as:

Tasks which are oriented to contingency plans, either as part of the preparation to carry out certain procedures, or as part of a scheduled bigger plan (e.g, BCP, DRP).

Tasks which are part of the tuning required to keep a system working properly and with optimal performance.

Tasks which are part of the monitoring you should carry out to anticipate any unexpected event in the best way.

Tasks which are part of maintenance to Automation Server as a product, to consider improvements through version upgrades.

 

Once your project has been deployed to a Production environment make sure you have a plan that considers the following tasks to make sure proper management and operation of the Bizagi System.

 

Tasks

Consider these tasks within your maintenance and administration plans.

 

1. Backing up Bizagi

It is important that you take a periodic snapshot of Bizagi, so you can restore Bizagi as a contingency measure for unplanned events.

Consider which components to backup, as described at Backups.

 

2. Monitoring your platform, services and relevant infrastructure assets

It is important to always monitor the underlying infrastructure and platform of Bizagi (the servers and further services integrated to your system), as well as monitoring the performance of Bizagi services.

For information about the recommended guidelines, refer to Monitoring.

 

3. Maintaining your database

It is important to constantly tune your database.

Additionally, by carrying out monitoring tasks on your database (and its performance), you will be able to detect features you may be able to optimize.

For more information about the recommended guidelines for these tasks, refer to Database Maintenance.

 

4. Managing environment parameters and other systems

At anytime you may review variables and parameters which affect Bizagi processes.

It is important to guarantee that notifications, integration points and other specifics of your project keep working properly, with optimal performance, and that their services are properly set in Bizagi.

Amongst environment parameters, make sure that the business configuration is adequate, and that configuration related to external systems (by means of Web services, SAP connector, SMTP server, LDAP authentication, ECM system integration, or databases via Data Virtualization and Replication) is accurate.

If you need to carry out any important changes in external systems (e.g, migrating the location of the servers that host your services), you can adjust the configuration in Bizagi.

For information about how to review and manage your system, refer to Environment settings and administration.

 

5. Upgrading your Bizagi version

Bizagi generates new versions periodically which include both great new features and bug fixes.

We strongly recommend that you upgrade your projects to the newest release, so you can enjoy the benefits of mew Bizagi features, enhancements and major improvements.

It is important that you plan and coordinate the upgrade, and that you carry out proper user acceptance tests are carried out before rolling out a version upgrade in a production environment.

We recommend following the guidelines and procedure to upgrade your project to a newer Bizagi version that are described at Bizagi versions and upgrades.

 

6. Publishing new versions and continuous improvements for your processes

As part of your own business-oriented maintenance, you should enforce continuous improvement for your published processed.

Bizagi offers you different process deployment alternatives to do this.

You should plan very carefully when to create a new version of a process running on a Production environment, and when to directly modify the original version.

For more information on this, refer to Continuous improvement and incremental deployments.