DRYiCE iControl v1.4.1

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.

Target Performance Page (Recap)

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

In addition to the above, Release 1.4.1 comes with the below features:

• Added Flow Hierarchy administration - The ability to identify Parent/Child flow relationships, where a ‘Child’ flow breach will have an impact on the 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 ‘Saved’ 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
• Added the ability to assign Uptime targets to multiple specific steps and links within a Flow.
• Added dependency details to target performance details pages, enabling 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 is 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 clicking ‘Save’.
• Cut-off Swimlanes Widget - Added the ability to select a different 'Group By’ setting (Flows, Products, Organisations, etc.) without having to re-select the widget. The Swimlanes changes to the new Group
• Additional Domain Packs (with Targets), additional verticals (Finance, Healthcare, CPG and Life sciences), around 50+ process flows, and an additional 250+ Flow Targets (in Finance & Utilities) added
• 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

In total there were 141 JIRA tickets completed including enhancements, improvements, new fixes, and features added as part of this release. Below are the key highlights:

• Uptime widget lane headers changed from names to refs to align correctly. Names appear as tooltips
• Amended monthly target edit form visualization and threshold configuration to align ‘Calendar days’ and `Business days’ user experience and removed from start/end of month drop-down.
• Amended days selection for monthly targets to allow for the selection of days within the ranges 1st (1) to 28th (28) as well as Last day (-1) to 28th to last day (-28)
• Added the ability to configure and save parent/child relationships
• All cut-off specific drill-down lists (e.g.:  from the cut-off swim lane widget), are sorted in threshold order (Standard order for other lists is target status order: Breached, Warning, Undecided, Not Breached)
• Added ability to manage (delete) orphan targets from the flow model. The bug that creates these orphans has already been resolved. This gives the user the ability to remove the reference within the Flow Designer

• Fixed bug where target active periods were incorrectly calculated across weekends.
• Fixed issue where processing of some events outside of the active window was resulting in null target performance being recorded in the historical data
• Fixed issue where targets were not being linked to applications when creating a new data stream
• Fixed error with processing Target Performance lifecycles with invalid lifecycle status.
• Fixed issue with blank setup page being displayed for a new install.
• Fixed issue with incorrect ‘lastObservationBreachedCount’ displayed in current Flow Performance page
• Fixed display of correct ‘latest’ status on Historic Uptime Performance widget.
• Fixed Current/Historic Target Performance widget issue, where changing the historic timeframe was not updating the widget unless you changed back to current in between.
• Fixed Target Performance list where error was occurring on the list if all the target list references were not available (due to deleted targets) to resolve existing data stream or historical cross-references
• Fixed monthly target visualisation display so that days of week displayed when ‘Days of Week’ selected
• Fixed error where user was unable to save a daily individual target where end time > 24:00:00
• Fixed separate but related error where user was unable to save a daily continuous cut-off target where active period duration was set greater than 24 hours, is only a limitation that applies to individual targets
• Fixed issue with monthly ‘Days of Week’ targets where certain threshold settings were unable to be saved even though they were valid and should have passed validation.
• Fixed bug whereby targets edit form would crash if switching from ‘Days of Week’ to ‘Calendar days’ or ‘Business days’ (or vice versa) after creating one or more thresholds. Now it asks the user “are you sure?” and switches after first deleting the previously created thresholds
• Fixed last day selection for monthly targets which caused errors to be logged when in a month with less than 31 days
• Fixed error with monthly targets where user could not enter an earlier start day with a later time
• Fixed issue where ‘Filter by’ being temporarily stored, refreshing iControl or opening a new instance would display the widget without the previously saved filter
• Fixed issue whereby creating a Domain Pack flow with targets would not always populate the reporting region correctly for all associated targets
• Fixed issue where adding a new target to a previously saved flow (within Flow Designer) would remove references to the targets already attached to the associated step/link/common list
• Fixed encoding of data so that the country names such as “Côte d'Ivoire” are displayed correctly
• Fixed count observation widget where the error was occurring when predictions exist but no observations
• Fixed current uptime performance widget displaying incorrect breach status on widget indicators
• Disabled dependency warnings (incomplete implementation within this release)
• Various bug fixes and UX improvements

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 Process Observability” 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 Process Observability 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 Process Observability 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