Tip 9: Monitor relentlessly

Tip 9 and 10 are closely related, but this tip is all about feedback.  If you know things are going well it’s great.  If you know things are going poorly, that is great too – because you can fix it.  The worst case scenario is that things are going pear-shaped in the background and you only hear about it when a user raises a case.  You need to be KPI’d on finding errors before your users – period.

How can you find errors before your users?  Here are a couple of tricks that Fusion5 implements for our clients:

ERP Analytics	Sometimes referred to the black box for your ERP, we use this to monitor performance and usage of JD Edwards. It records every page load, by every user – every minute of every day.  This information is incredibly powerful for benchmarking and comparing ANY change in your entire enterprise.
UBE Analytics	Having access to the runtime, rows processed, user and server information for every batch job allows us to continually monitor the critical two tiers of JD Edwards.  Reading this with ERP Analytics gives more information on where performance problems might be and another point of data to compare with.
Log monitoring	Fusion5 has a very advanced cloud formation in AWS which utilises cloudwatch to monitor all log files, UBEs and JD Edwards connections.  This enables us to graph and monitor user connections, concurrent UBEs and search ANY logfile for ANY error – ever.  This is a single console for all logs across JD Edwards.  This approach and consistency can be used with many different installation types, not just limited to AWS.
DB growth monitoring	Keeping an eye on table by table database growth is critical for understanding if a process has gone rogue.  It’s also critical for maintaining consistent database performance.  Regular rowcount reporting and size reporting will ensure that you can deliver a service level to your users that is acceptable.  Maintenance of your data size is important for costs and restoration times.

Figure 12: Sample custom dashboard showing metrics that are 100% relevant for JD Edwards

Figure 13: AWS log insights provides intelligence that would previously be impossible to find.  This shows a graphical representation of errors and type of errors over 8 separate web servers.