The Admin > System page lets you monitor and manage CIC Engine activity in real-time. Watching and controlling the activity shown here helps you tackle many potential issues. Here are a few examples to consider:

• You expect a period of heavy Purchase Order traffic (for example, Black Friday) and want to ensure a fast turnaround for these particular document types. Increasing the number of active processes allowed for that document type allows greater concurrent processing. Increasing priority ensures CIC will pick up these document types before others.
• You generate outbound EDI documents, which require a database SELECT operation that runs often. If two of these processes run concurrently, it is possible that the database won't be updated fast enough to be reflected correctly for both processes resulting in duplicate records being selected. In this case, limiting CIC Engine to a single active process for this type of outbound EDI document can prevent this situation from occurring.
• You have identified a particular process that has timed out or is running longer than normal. You can cancel it directly without the need to contact Support.  

Viewing and Managing System Information

The top three panels (System Status, Active Processes, Queued Processes) display the status of the system and system-level information about active processes (those currently running) and queued processes (those waiting to run).  

In addition, you can use the System Status panel to pause and resume CIC Engine operation.

Pausing and Resuming System Processing

Pausing and resuming system processing allows systems to be taken offline without having to reprocess payloads. When the system is paused, payloads are held until the system is resumed. This is useful, for example, for last-minute project changes, where, instead of making the adjustment while transactions are flowing you can suspend the system while you test and deploy your changes, minimizing reprocessing efforts. 

Note: When you click the Pause button, CIC processes any payloads that are in a queue before the system is considered to be in a "paused" state. 

To pause or resume processing for the entire system, use the toggle in the System Status box. 

Pausing the system suspends processing on all transactions, inbound and outbound, and those items are queued until you resume. This can take up to several hours, depending on the current load.

Once the system is completely stopped, the status is shown as Paused and the number of Active Processes displayed is 0.

Pausing is also recorded in the CIC Cockpit Audit Trail (who, when, before/after state).

Note: This feature is available to all customers, but in some cases may need to be enabled for your particular environment. Please contact our Support team if you would like to have this feature enabled.

Workload Prioritization 

Workload Prioritization can be managed using two tabs on the System page - Events and Active Processes, shown here. Combined, these tabs provide the following capabilities: 

• manage the number of processes assigned to an Event queue
• assign the priority to Event queues
• pause and resume an Event queue
• view and cancel active processes
• view Job details associated with an active process

Events tab

The Events tab has these columns:

Pausing and Resuming Event Processing

To pause processing for a single event, click the icon in the Action column for the event. This will toggle processing on or off. Note: this is also recorded in the CIC Cockpit Audit Trail (who, when, before/after state).

To pause and resume processing for multiple events, select the events in the list and then click the Pause or Resume button.

Prioritizing Event Queues

Workload Prioritization enables you to prioritize business-critical and time-sensitive processes and prevent processes from competing for resources to help ensure processes are completed in the correct sequence.

On the Events tab, use the drop-down menus in the Priority column to set priorities for events. Lower values indicate higher priority. Higher-priority processes are performed before lower-priority processes.

Active Processes tab

The Active Processes tab has these columns:

Viewing and Cancelling Active Processes

You can view and cancel active processes by either selecting the Active Processes tab or by clicking the number in the Active Processes pane, both shown below. Both options will show all processes running within all Events. Cancellations are audited, including which process/queue was affected.

To view only the active processes for a specific Event, click the link under the Active Processes column for that Event. An Active Processes pane will appear.

To cancel an active process, use the checkbox in the Active Processes panel (shown above to the right) to select one or many processes for cancellation. A Business Process may have child processes, as shown above.

Note: Cancellation applies to the first process in the hierarchy (parent process) and also impacts subsequently invoked processes or child processes, streamlining the cancellation process without the need for multiple actions. 

• When canceling a group of processes, use the large cancel button .
• When canceling an individual process, you can also use the smaller button .

Viewing Jobs related to Active Processes

You can view detailed information about the job responsible for a given active process.  Click the link in the View In Job column for the process in question.  

Audit Trail for Workload Prioritizer Actions

Actions taken in the Workload Prioritizer, which include global suspend/resume, per-queue pause/resume, changes to Max Active Processes and Priority, and process cancellations, are recorded in the CIC Cockpit Audit Trail. Each entry includes the user who performed the action, the action itself with before and after values, the affected queue or process, and a timestamp. These entries can be filtered alongside other Audit Trail entries.
See related topics below for more information. 

Related Topics

• Audit Trail
• Infrastructure Maintenance Workflows and CIC