Question
· Apr 27, 2020

Issues Monitoring Activity Volume

Hi all.

A long time ago I enabled Activity Monitoring to be able to save myself headaches in the future when looking at the performance of various message routes through our productions.  It's served it's purpose of answering questions on how many messages we process a week etc but I had not had the chance to really dig down into the stats for specific message types or destinations to pin point issues.

That time has come, as I have an outbound that periodically queues up without much rhyme or reason.

This should be very easy to look at, but it seems that the auto refresh not only refreshes the data, but also all of the drop down items I have set.

Has anyone else faced this issue and/or know of the solution? It seems to be related to the changes to page refreshes that came in around the 2019 mark (I'm currently sat on Healthconnect 2019.1) as I don't recall this happening when I first set this up.

Discussion (3)1
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Hello Julian,

The default behavior in your version would be for the activity monitor page to not auto-refresh, but I saw in one of your posts that you have enabled SMP auto-refresh.

https://community.intersystems.com/post/queues-refresh-iris-20191

The activity monitor dashboard is really just a starting point - once you start collecting data using the activity monitor you can easily access the monitor tables such as ens_activity_data.days with SQL.

Hi Vic.

I hadn't considered that the change in that post would have that effect, as the change was to bring back the ability to set a refresh rate on certain pages - good spot. The Activity Monitor page certainly suggest it should always be refreshing every 60 seconds anyway, so I guess it's another section of the product that had its refresh broken by the changes in 2019... smiley

I was hoping to avoid reinventing the wheel as the dashboard is otherwise functional, but I guess we can't win them all.

I don't suppose you know if 2020 contains any improvement in this area?

As far as I know I don't think this behavior has changed in 2020. While I was testing the monitor myself recently I noticed the dropdowns getting cleared but when I saw that auto-refresh was disabled in newer versions I didn't  think I needed to follow up on this. If you disable the refresh global you'll find that the tagline of 60s refresh no longer appears as well.

If you really felt this was worth changing I'd recommend that you reach out to your ISC representative (or the WRC) but I would be prepared for the response that the monitor is not intended to be a complete solution. That is not to say that a change to help alleviate the behavior are seeing would not be considered, so if this is really tripping you up it would be worth reporting - maybe others have the same pain and there's enough momentum to get this addressed.

You may find the following article useful in terms of building your own monitoring solution.

https://community.intersystems.com/post/monitoring-intersystems-iris-using-built-rest-api

Hope that helps.