Action Center

Prerequisites

ActiveBatch Health Service (required). As of V12 SP8 and higher, Health Service is installed on the Job Scheduler server by default; therefore you are no longer required to perform a separate installation and configuration.
Email Client (optional): If you wish to contact ASCI Customer Success regarding any Action Center recommendations, you will need an email client configured on the system where the ActiveBatch console is installed.

Overview

The Action Center provides you with a list of recommendations that you can implement to improve the efficiency of your

ActiveBatch environment. The recommendations are modeled after information that is provided in the Health Service’s Health Check report. The Health Check report is divided into Key Success Factors (KSF’s) such as maintainability and database health. Within each KSF you will find an overview, contributing factors, maturity level and recommendations.

The Action Center transposes the KSF recommendations into smaller logical units called “Action Center Cards”, where each Card falls within one of the KSF categories. Much like the Health Check report, each Action Center Card offers an overview, contributing factors and recommendations. The Action Center provides features and/or links to resources that will assist in the implementation of the recommended changes. Once you make the suggested change, you can mark it complete. Action Center data is automatically updated every week, a frequency that allows you to stay on top of maintaining an optimized ActiveBatch environment.

Access Action Center

To access the Action Center view, navigate to the Views pane and click on Action Center.

What you see next will vary depending on the state of Health Service (the prerequisite described at the beginning of this section). Let’s go over what the possibilities are.

Health Service Not Installed<Critical>
- Remedy: Install the Health Service. This component is required to generate Health Check reports and Action Center data. A useful link that accompanies this message will take you to ASCI’s Product Updates web page. Login to MyASCI and download the Health Service installation kit. Install Health Service on the Job Scheduler server.
  - Note: As of V12 SP8, the above message will not appear since Health Service is installed automatically and no longer requires a separate installation, as it did in V12 SP7 and earlier. In addition, starting with 2023, the Health Service installation kit is not available as a separate download for this version.
Health Service Not Running <Critical> - This means the Health Service has been installed but the service is not currently running.
- Remedy: Start the Health Service by clicking on the Start Health Service button that is conveniently accessible on the Action Center page.
Welcome to the Action Center. There are no evaluations yet. Please check back in a week.
- As the message indicates, check back in a week for recommendations. This message is seen only once - after a new installation of Health Service. The data required for Action Center will automatically be provided through Health Service, based on an internal weekly schedule. There is nothing more for you to do.
Thanks for keeping up with best practices and taking good care of your ActiveBatch environment. Based on our last evaluation, everything is optimized.
- Congratulations! As stated, this means your environment is fully optimized. Check back weekly to see if there are any new recommendations.
The Action Center has one or more recommendations.
- When this is the case, you will see Action Center Card(s), one for each recommendation. This documentation does not list and describe each Action Center Card. They are typically self-explanatory, and if more information is needed, many Cards include various links to resources that will assist you in acquiring knowledge about the Card’s topic.

Action Center UI Overview

The image below depicts what the Action Center interface will look like when an evaluation of your environment results in one or more Action Center Cards. Let’s start by discussing the Action Center’s header bar, toolbar, and footer bar.

Action Center Header Bar

Contact Us

This button will send out an email to ASCI’s Customer Success Team. It should be used when you have any questions regarding the Action Center’s recommendations.

Search

The search filter allows you to narrow down what Action Center Cards you wish to see in the view. The text on the front of each Card is searchable (i.e., the text that is present when the cards are initally displayed). Enter a word or phrase (case-insensitive) to search for. Press the <Enter> key or click the Search icon to apply the search. Only Cards that have matching text will be displayed in the Action Center view. After a search filter has been applied, you will see the search text that was previously entered placed under the search textbox. As depicted in the image below, the search text entered was “database health”, therefore the Action Center will only display Cards that have the words “database health” on the front of their card. To remove the search filter, click on the X above the search text. The view will automatically refresh. You can enter more than one search value. Please enter them one at a time. Action Center Cards that contain any search values entered will be a match (“or” is used).

On each Action Center Card, you can mark the Card completed when the recommendation has been implemented. Completed Cards can be hidden in the view by enabling the “Hide completed” feature. To enable it, click on the Hide Completed checkbox.

Evaluated On

This field specifies the date and time of the last evaluation, which is managed by ASCI under-the-hood. Currently, new Action Center evaluation data is made available weekly.

Updates Received

This button is only visible in the toolbar when the Action Center is open and new evaluation data arrives. See the image below, which also includes the tooltip you will see when you mouse over the “Updates Received” button.

If you click on the button, a confirmation message will pop up as follows:

Click on OK or Cancel. Keep in mind that with an OK response, you may see one or more Cards that were in prior evalution(s) if:

Changes were made in your ActiveBatch environment between evaluations – resulting in the recommendation again.
A Card was marked complete but the actual work was not done. When this happens, the status of the Card will revert from “Completed” to “Mark Completed”. If you mouse over the Card’s Mark Completed button, you will see a tooltip message stating “Reset by System”. This indicates the Card was previously marked completed, but the recommended action was not implemented.

Action Center Footer Bar

Status: This field indicates how many recommendations are currently being displayed, and how many recommendations there are in total. Action Center Cards that are not being displayed have either been marked as completed and “Hide completed” is enabled, and/or they have been filtered out because they do not meet Search filter criteria that is currently being applied. In the example below, 3 cards are currently visible out of a total of 6.

Let’s look at details regarding Action Center Cards.

Action Center Cards

Action Center Cards are the recommended optimization changes, sorted by priority, where “Urgent” Cards are listed at the top. The order of the cards is not user configurable. Other statuses include critical, important, and recommended. Completed cards are always at the bottom of the view, visible when “Hide Completed” is disabled. An outline is drawn around each Card, to delineate one Card from another.

Each Card includes:

A heading that identifies the feature that the recommendation is referring to
The name of the Key Success Factor (KSF) the Card is associated with
An Overview that provides a brief synopsis of the feature that correlates to the recommended change
Contributing Factors as to why the change is recommended
Recommendations on how to resolve the suggested change
A button whose label is either “Mark Completed” or “Completed”

Some Cards include:

Useful links to:
- Knowledgebase articles or other published documents
- Graphs
A button named “Show Affected Templates”
A button named “Open Property Sheet”

Mark Completed/Completed

When a recommendation is completed, click on the “Mark Completed” button. The button’s label will turn green, and its text will change to “Completed”. In addition, the Card will be moved to the bottom of the list. The completed Card will be visible providing the “Hide Completed” feature is not enabled. If you mouse over the Completed button, a tooltip will pop up identifying the user who marked the Card complete, and the date and time this event occurred (see the image below).

The Completed button’s tooltip also indicates that you can click on the Completed button if you wish to reset the state back to “New”. If that action is taken, the Card will be placed back at the top of the list, and the button’s label will revert to “Mark Completed”.

Open Property Sheet

This button will appear on a Card when the recommendation involves a single ActiveBatch object. When a user clicks on this button, the object’s property sheets will be opened and tabbed in the Web Console’s Main view. This behavior mirrors what happens when you double-click on a Job object in the Navigation pane.

Let’s look at an example that includes the “Mark Completed” and “Open Property Sheet” buttons. In the image below, we see a Card that is addressing an urgent issue – “DbPurge Failures”. The KSF this falls under is Database Health. The “Overview” describes what DBPurge is, in the event a user was uncertain of its purpose. The Card’s “Contributing Factors” state that DBPurge has failed 12 times in the last 30 days. This is what needs to be investigated and corrected. The “Recommendations” primarily focus on managing failures going forward. It may be necessary for you to look at failed DbPurge instances, most pointedly the job log file, to assist in troubleshooting this issue.

If you would like to view and/or change the properties of DbPurge, click on the Card’s “Open Property Sheet” button. In the case of DbPurge, this is quite handy as you may not know where the job is located, since it is built-into the product.

After the DbPurge issue has been resolved, click the Card’s “Mark Completed” button as depicted in the image above. In the image below, you will see what has changed after marking the Card complete. The text of the button has changed to “Completed”, the label is now green, and the Card is moved to the bottom of the Action Center list.

When this button is selected, the original Card text (Overview, Contributing Factors, etc.) will be replaced with a list of Templates that require updating to complete the Card’s recommendation.

Let’s look at an example.

The Variable Usage Card, depicted in the image below, consists of a recommendation to use variables when configuring property values that are environment-specific and/or shared.

Observe that this Card has the “Show Affected Templates” button. In addition, there is a progress bar indicator that is displaying “Completed 0/8 (0%)”. This means that there are 8 templates that are affected (need to be updated), and 0 have been changed thus far, therefore 0% is complete.

When the Show Affected Templates button is clicked, you will see something similar as depicted in the image below. The Card’s left-most side is representative of the Navigation pane’s tree structure. It is only displaying the containers where there are objects that need to be modified (i.e., the container is within the object’s full path.) There are one or more hard-coded property values in each object that needs to be replaced with a variable.

Observe the “Copy All” button in the image below. When selected, it will copy information about each job (object ID and field name(s) that should be replaced with variables), allowing you to paste it into a target application (e.g., a document, email body, etc.). Observe in the image where it states, “Click on the templates shown below to view the recommendations for each one.” Some Cards will include this option.

When you expand a folder, then click on a template in the list, additional information about what property(s) to update will appear, as depicted in the image below. In this example, the selected job is JobsLibSQL. Notice on the right side of the image, you see two bulleted items which are the fields used in the job that should be replaced with variables.

To edit the properties, click on the pencil icon to the right of JobsLibSQL. The property sheets for the selected job will open and be tabbed in the Main view.

The image below depicts the Jobs Library Job Step that needs to be updated to include variable references instead of the current hard-coded values in the ServerName and Database properties.

After making the recommended changes, click on the selected job’s “Mark Completed” icon (see the icon circled in red in the image below) – which is initially green, but turns red when completed. When marking the change complete, the progress bar indicator (outlined in red below) will automatically update, where 1 out of 8, or 12% of the recommended changes have been completed. This will help you keep track of what has been completed, for the Card as a whole, especially if you do not complete all the changes in one session.

If you mouse over a job’s “Mark Completed” icon after it has been completed, you will see a tooltip displaying the user who marked it complete, and the date and time. If the state needs to be reset, click on the icon again, and it will toggle back to a New (incomplete) status.

When all objects identified on the Card are updated with variables and marked complete, the status indicator will update to 100% complete. When that is the case, mark the entire Card complete, by clicking on the Card’s Mark Completed button. The next time the Action Center data is evaluated, you will not see this Card unless new objects have hard-coded property values that need to be replaced with variables.

Moving away from the Variables Usage Card discussion, the Constraint Checks Card also has a “Show Affected Templates” button. Like the Variable Usage Card, you can open the job’s property sheets, make the recommended changes, and mark each change complete. An additional feature on the Constraint Checks Card is depicted as a blue icon, circled in red below.

If you mouse over the icon, the tooltip states: “Use Default Policy dialog to push down changes to all children”. This optional feature prompts you to create a Default Job Policy to set constraint property values that align with the Card’s recommendation. The Default policy can be used to update (“push down”) the constraint properties for all the jobs in the Scripts container. The Default Policy feature is not specific to Action Center, but rather, the Action Center is providing access to the feature.

Job Scheduler Information Page

The Job Scheduler Information Page, open by default in the Main view, provides the following Health Check information:

(see the image below).

Number of Action Cards based on priority (this is updated real-time as Cards are marked complete)
A link to open Action Center
A link to View the ActiveBatch Health Check Report (when a report is available)

Action Center and Security

There are no security restrictions regarding accessing the Action Center view and updating Card statuses (e.g. Mark Complete). If the Card involves accessing object properties and making changes to objects, the security for the individual objects will apply (e.g., to modify a Job’s properties, you will need read/write and modify permissions granted on the job object).

Spotted a typo or can’t find help on a certain subject? Reach out to the Documentation team at docsupport@redwood.com.