- Log Analysis
- Blocked Processes
- Queue Analysis
In our last two articles, we discussed the importance of BizFlow log analysis and the potentially vicious cycle of blocked processes. In this article, we’ll discuss another key BizFlow monitoring and management challenge – queue analysis and tuning.
BizFlow Queues: A Delicate Balance
Queue analysis and tuning is important in BizFlow for two reasons:
- All work items flow through the BizFlow queues at some level; and
- The volume of work introduced into the BizFlow queues directly affects system performance
In a typical BizFlow deployment, work flows into the queues from another application in the environment, such as an imaging application or a customer-facing order entry system. If the BizFlow queues are not effectively monitored and tuned, they can quickly become a bottleneck in the system.
Controlling the flow of work into BizFlow is a delicate balance. If too much work enters the queues, BizFlow performance rapidly degrades and you risk ending up with blocked processes in the database that can cause an outage. However, if the flow of work is too low, business-user productivity suffers as work items are not processed in a timely manner.
Two Approaches to Controlling Work Item Flow
There are two common approaches to regulating the flow of work items into BizFlow:
- External controls
- Queue tuning
The first alternative is to build appropriate external controls to manage the volume of work items before they reach BizFlow. This approach is preferred because it offers more fine-grained control and the ability for the controls to be dynamic — dynamic controls don’t exist within BizFlow itself.
Another option for regulating the flow of work into the system is to modify the configuration parameters for the BizFlow queues. HandySoft supplies a number of parameters for tuning BizFlow queues, including:
- The total number of queues
- The number of threads associated with each queue (# of jobs each queue can simultaneously process)
- The check interval for each queue
- The maximum amount of time each queue will wait for a job to process
Regardless of which alternative you use to regulate the flow of work into BizFlow, monitoring key data about the BizFlow queues is absolutely critical for making good choices in your parameter settings.
The Challenge of Monitoring BizFlow Queues
In order to effectively tune BizFlow queues, you need to collect detailed statistics about each queue including:
- Elements in Queue
- Queue Activities Added per Minute
- Rate of Queue Processing
- Queue Size
- Queue Processing Rate
- Total Number of Errors
- Rate of Errors
You also need the ability to correlate this queue-specific data with system load on the application server, system load on the database server, and end-user response times to help guide your tuning efforts.
However, BizFlow queues are file system based. Most monitoring solutions don’t offer a mechanism to deal with file content monitoring. Absolute Performance's System Shepherd® platform, on the other hand, equally monitors file content, database records and business processes and is precisely architected to make and visualize correlations between all these diverse data sources.
