What Enterprises Need: System Reporting

This is the seventh installment in our weekly technical blog series about Enterprise Content Transformation: What Enterprises Need. The series kicked off with an overview of the reasons your organization needs a platform that has linear scalability, high availability, easy integration with existing systems, is highly configurable, and offers built-in monitoring and alerting.

How can IT prevent support calls when the demands on them are continuously increasing, while at the same time their resources are decreasing? System reporting is part of the answer.

Job processing time can vary significantly due to the type of job operations required.  For example, performing OCR (optical character recognition) takes significantly more CPU resources than it does to combine documents into one PDF.  In addition, demand on the enterprise content transformation system is often “bursty,” making it very difficult to predict the system size required to meet users’ expectations. The Adlib Platform provides the following reports to help IT better manage the system.

1. System Load – This report collects the average load on the complete system as well as on each transformation engine. The load can be reported hourly, daily or weekly, allowing IT to identify the periods of greatest demand and any bottlenecks in the system. Analysing the periods of peak demand allows IT to detect whether the system sizing is adequate.
2. Job Processing Time– This report provides the time the system took to complete the job, as well as the source of the job and the date and time it was submitted. This allows IT to confirm if the system is achieving the Service Level Agreement (SLA) commitment, along with the times the system did not meet the SLA. This data is also useful for calculating the charge-back cost for the system usages to the various business units.
3. Job Volume – This report provides the number of jobs processed by the complete system, in addition to jobs processed by each transformation engine. The job processed can be reported hourly, daily or weekly, providing information for IT to assist in sizing the system and perform capacity planning.
4. Job Success – This report provides the percentage of jobs that completed successfully for each time interval (hourly, daily, weekly) so IT can identify if the system is failing to what degree.

Additional reports can be added to the system (via Professional Services) to meet specific organizational needs. All reports allow for filtering and sorting the tabular information to allow users to narrow down the information they need. In addition, all report data can be exported to Excel for further analysis and reporting.  This information can be used to report things like “percentage of system usage by business unit” and to support the business case for system capacity planning.

Adlib’s system reporting provides the necessary information to enable IT to optimally manage the system with little effort, thereby ensuring committed service performance.