NOTIFY IS AN ADD-ON THAT GREATLY ENHANCES THE EMAIL NOTIFICATION FLEXIBILITY AND USABILITY OF TCI.

With this add-on, you will be able to control the timing of aggregated error alert emails, vary recipients based on the app, flow, or even a specific error message, include the error messages right in the emails, and add an optional resolution for each specific error.

TIBCO Cloud™ Integration - Connect (TCI – Connect), formally known as TIBCO Scribe® Online, has many new and powerful features that are improvements to its predecessor, Scribe Insight. 

However, the error reporting and the corresponding email notifications capabilities are more limited in TCI – Connect than Insight.  Customer Sync has developed an add-on solution for TCI - Connect that greatly enhances the error monitoring and email notification capabilities.

Below are the out-of-the-box notification options provided in TCI - Connect for the currently logged-in user.  These settings are limited; they apply to all integration Applications and Flows within each organization, and email alerts are sent after every execution.

THE PROBLEM

For TCI - Connect administrators, the error alerting and investigation typically starts with a view like this from your email inbox.

If your email client groups like messages together, like Gmail, you get all of the emails grouped.  However, as in the example above with 51, you can get dozens of emails in a few hours.

When you open each email, you get counts of the number of records processed and failed, but no information about the individual errors.  You have to open each email to see if they are from the same solution, or from different solutions.

The next step is to log in to TCI - Connect, go to the Execution History page and view the errors for each failing solution. 

Here you are shown a page that looks like the one below, again without any error detail.

If you drill down into one of the lines to see the error detail, you see a page like the one below.  If there are only a few errors, like in the example below, it’s not too difficult to see what happened.  However, if there are dozens of errors and several pages to go through, it can be very difficult to answer questions like these:

• Did I get the same error 127 times, or several different errors summing up to 127 total?

• Are all of the errors tied to the same bit of bad data, or are there multiple bad entries?  For example, one bad item SKU multiple times, or multiple bad item SKUs?

THE SOLUTION

The Customer Sync monitoring and email notification system send users an email that looks like the one below.  Note the following significant improvements:

• The error messages returned during the map execution are right in the email.  See the yellow highlighted error.

• The email contents are grouped and subtotaled by the error message itself.  Now you can see at a glance that you got the “bad item SKU” error 24 times and another error twice (not shown).

• Error logging in your map can be configured to append (or prepend) data values right into the error message that is logged.  This way, bad data values (a bad SKU, for example, like in the blue highlight) are included right in the email.  Since grouping and subtotaling is done by the full error message, each message with a bad SKU is grouped and subtotaled separately.

• The same error information can be included in the email body, as an attachment, or both.

• The schedule for monitoring and sending notifications is independent of the solutions that are monitored.  Most users prefer a frequency between once an hour to once every 4 hours.  If your solution runs once every 5 minutes, this provides one email every few hours with a nice summary instead of dozens of emails.

• If the solution design depends on “Reprocessing” failed records from the “Pending” log, emails can be resent on every run until the Not Reprocessed counts go to zero.  This acts as an ongoing reminder every few hours until the issues are resolved.

• Resolution instructions can be included in the email!  Phrases from common error messages are added to a list along with their corresponding resolution instructions.  When that phrase is contained with the error message, the resolution is added to the email.  See the Resolution section in the email shown in the image.

CONFIGURATION OF EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS FROM CUSTOMER SYNC NOTIFY HAS THE ADDITIONAL SIGNIFICANT BENEFITS:

• Email recipients can be for people that do not have a TCI - Connect login, as well as for email groups or distribution lists.

• Notifications can be sent at up to 4 levels of granularity:

  - All errors for an Organization

  - Filtered by the Application (aka solution)

  - Filtered by the Application and Flow (aka map)

  - Filtered by the Application, Flow, and a specific error message

• The body of the email can be configured as well.  This allows the administrator to provide an overview of how errors are retried (or not) for each map or solution.  High-level resolution instructions that are not related to specific error messages can be included here.  See the first paragraph in the sample email on the previous page.

• While sometimes it is important to include a bit of data with the error message, like in the SKU example above, other times you need to remove data from an error message.  Some error messages always come back with embedded values, like a key-value or GUID.  Situations like this can be configured to search and replace the embedded value with a generic value.  For example, replace the GUID value in a certain error message with xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx.  This enables the error to group and summarize correctly, so you get one error with a count of 127 instead of 127 different errors.

• The configuration database contains a log of all email notifications sent to all recipients, providing a central repository for easy review and analysis.

• Inactivity monitoring and alerting can also be configured!

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• The monitoring solution is imported into a TCI - Connect Organization that will act as the “master” org.

• TCI - Connect API access needs to be enabled for all monitored organizations.

• SQL Server version 2012 or later is required to store settings and logs.  The database must be accessible from an agent under the “master” org.

• Database Mail must be enabled on the SQL Server instance.  Configuration to send email via an SMTP server must be completed.

Let’s talk more about Customer Sync Notify and make sure it’s the right solution for you.