DRYiCE iControl v1.4

DRYiCE iControl (iControl) provides the business context to operational events by linking application, business units, and products to a business flow supporting delivery of a product or service to an endpoint. iControl resolves the challenges with data sanity/accuracy to enhance Target performance monitoring and add predictive real-time monitoring through Machine Learning and a growing list of dashboard widgets.

A new Target Performance Page that lists all current ‘active’ targets and there active period status and last observation status. As with the existing target drill-down lists (accessed via dashboard widgets), it also gives the user access to target observation widgets and the target details that can be amended if required, by permitted users.

With the Target Performance Page comes the following built-in functionality:

• Ability to `Filter By’ Flows, Products, Organizations, Geographical locations, Severity, and many more
• Ability to ‘Filter By’ Breach Statuses (Breached, Not-breached, Undecided, or Warnings)
• Ability to ‘Filter By’ Target Type (Comparison, Count, Cut-off, Duration, Throughput, Uptime)
• Ability to display performance by timeframe (Now, 1 Week, 1 Month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year)
• Ability to export the Target Performance list to a comma-separated file for manipulation within Excel, etc.
• Moving away from or refreshing the Target Performance list page preserves the previously selected filters on returning to the page within the same ‘logged in’ session
• Target observations ‘pinned’ from the performance page list will be added to the default dashboard

Other New Features and Enhancements

In total there were 121 JIRA tickets completed including enhancements, improvements, new fixes, and features added as part of this release. Below are the key highlights.

• Added Flow Hierarchy administration, the ability to identify Parent/Child flow relationships (where a ‘Child’ flow breach will have an impact on associated ‘Parent’ Flows
• Added multiple flow designer tabs to facilitate access and editing to a ‘Parent’ and it’s ‘Child’ flows all at the same time, when save is clicked it will save updates to all flows open in tabs
• Updated Flow list page to display ‘Child’ flow details
• Updated Flow Designer page tabs to display Flow reference instead of the Flow name, to accommodate multiple tabs
• Ability to assign Uptime targets to multiple specific Steps and Links within a Flow
• The addition of dependency details to target performance details pages enables the distinction between dependency warnings and predictive warnings
• Adjusted the default timeframe displayed within Cut-off Swimlane Widgets to view cut-off thresholds up to 12 hours ahead
• Additional macros added to iControl to access processing and performance status details
• Additional macro added to monitor observations queue processing performance
• Add flowKey to Target Performance details to facilitate future Flow Performance features
• Added ‘Target Type’ filter to Target drill-down list (accessed from widgets)
• When refreshing the Target drill-down list updated to preserve filters (including textual filter)
• Flow Widgets added the ability to change from one Flow to another without having to re-select the Flow Widget, the Flow widget displays the newly selected Flow on save
• Cut-off Swimlanes Widgets added the ability to select a different ‘Group By’ setting (Flows, Products, Organisations, etc.) without having to re-select the widget, the Swimlanes change to the new Group
• Additional Domain Packs (with Targets), additional verticals (Finance, Healthcare, CPG, and Life sciences) added around 50+ process flows and an additional 250+ Flow Targets (in Finance & Utilities)

Flow Widgets will display the full list of Link targets when clicking on a link target ‘dot’ to enable full access of all targets on the link in one list, this can be filtered by type and status within the drop-down.

• Historic Uptime Widget endpoint returning errors unable to display results, resolved
• Target Performance calculation errors occurring after target deletions, resolved
• Breached cut-off targets not updating the latest threshold if changed, resolved
• Unable to edit previously added links within the Flow Designer page, resolved
• Unable to select a new monthly cut-off continuous target, resolved
• Data Stream view details page, being displayed prior to loading the details endpoint, resolved
• Observation Widgets always ‘pinned’ to the default dashboard and not the current dashboard, resolved
• Flow designer not displaying the last ‘saved’ flow details until app refresh, resolved
• Able to break list pages by entering ‘special’ characters in the text search filter, resolved
• When adding a target through Flow Designer and going directly to Data Stream to add it unable to see the new target in the drop-down list until iControl refreshed, resolved
• Newly created Flow not appearing in widget ‘Filter By’ drop-down until iControl refreshed, resolved
• Flow schema updates to accommodate Parent/Child Flow relationships
• Target Schema updates to accommodate dependency breach status and dependant objects
• Datetime parsing, reconciliation of moment codes with python strftime directives
• Created process for collecting python dependency licenses
• Changes to icontrol_implementer role to restrict permissions as required
• Patch 13, updated Flow schema and other changes within existing iControl instances
• Converted existing Domain Pack Flows to new Flow schema formatting
• Moved Flow details pre-loading to flow pages to ensure the latest details are displayed
• Changed Dimension lists sort order to the same as in filters and selection drop-down lists
• Increased code test coverage from 65% to 72+%
• Various bug fixes and UX improvement

• Predictions Processor running continuously, changes to trigger predictions calculations only when required (Target life cycle start, amendments to predictive model or changes to thresholds)
• Removed Target, Monitoring Point and Base Search endpoints from start-up (unless required by widgets within the default dashboard)

DRYiCE iControl dependencies:

• Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit v5 (for Splunk 8) or v4 (for Splunk 7.3.4)

iControl is a product within the emerging market sector of operational intelligence – technology solutions that leverage analytics to help end-users continuously monitor and manage business operations in real-time.

iControl forms part of a combined software and services solution developed by DRYiCE around “Business Flow Monitoring” which enables its customers to monitor, measure and report on the impact of IT performance in delivering business outcomes.  Today iControl is primarily used by the project team as an implementation tool.

Business Flow Monitoring provides real time monitoring against business relevant targets. It is used by operations and technology staff on a day-to-day basis to ensure smooth running of the bank’s critical business flows to deliver end product outcomes.

Key elements of a Business Flow Monitoring implementation are to:

• Define a visual “flow” for the end-to-end business process
• Define service-level targets to set expected performance for key points within the flow
• Associate these targets with metric data provided from underlying monitoring
• Calculate real-time service-level performance and capture variance from expected levels

For support related inquiries, please reach us at support.dryice.ai@hcl.com