Exception Management

Exception Management: What's the Problem?

The first problem with exception management in today's distributed, interconnected applications is finding where and what the processing problem is. Consider this: a call center representative enters an order, which, in turn, triggers a message across multiple different applications. If one of these applications requires some data that is missing, it can't process the order, and the order is dropped.

Assuring business transactions process successfully is vital. To fix the problem, first you have to find its source. Yet distributed, interconnected applications execute over heterogeneous systems, often located in different places and owned by different groups. Once you find where the processing failure occurs, how do you know if the issue is a system, application, or data problem?

Faster, Easier Exception Management with Actional Enterprise

Progress® Actional® Enterprise offers a solution for managing exceptions in distributed, interconnected applications. It enables the support team to collaborate with the application development team for faster, accurate exception management and provides tools to help detect, diagnose, and resolve system, application, and data problems quickly.

Actional provides transaction monitoring and policy-based alerting with end-to-end visibility, via flow maps, across distributed applications. When an alert is triggered, the support team can perform root-cause analysis, drilling down to a flow map of the individual problem transaction and related statistics. If the problem is a system, Actional will reveal which one, enabling a resolution.

When the alert occurs, the Actional audit log captures the message and all contextual information. The audit log can be transferred into a Workspace. Here business analysts and developers can collaborate with the support team. The team can compare the content of the failed message to the content of a prior successful message, to help detect differences and pinpoint the issue. If the issue is due to a bug in the code, the development team can alter the code, create a test case, and add it to a Test Suite for regression testing to ensure the problem doesn't recur. If the problem is a message (i.e., the data), it can be fixed, updated, invoked, and re-sent back through the application for processing.

Benefits of Streamlined Exception Management

In all cases the transaction is back on track with faster exception management. For the customer, Actional reduces the time wasted with processing hassles. For support staffs, the problem is solved in less time. For the development teams, by fixing bug problems they also increase the long-term quality of the application. And for the business, all of these benefits translate into lower costs, higher revenues, and greater customer satisfaction.

Exception Management