System Administration

The Admin > System page allows you to monitor and control CIC Engine activity in real-time. Monitoring and controlling the kind of activity displayed on this page allows you to address possible issues. Consider the following examples:

• 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 panes (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.

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.

Using the Workload Prioritizer 

The Workload Prioritizer, shown below, provides 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

The Events section 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.

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

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.

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 .
  

Prioritizing Event Queues

The Workload Prioritizer 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.

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.