How to Activate the Contracts (Contract Manager)

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How to Activate the Contracts (Contract Manager)

The activation of a Contract is done by committing it. (For further details, see the Online Help.)

The activation of the Contract triggers the Engine to initiate the calculations for the Contract's Metrics and to start producing results for the Contract.

Before activating the Contract check whether all of the following conditions have been fulfilled:

All the Metrics must have Business Logic defined for them (In the Metric or as a linked module) which has been tested and contains no errors.
All the Metrics have a defined dashboard threshold. (For further details, see the Online Help.) It is important that the thresholds are already defined so that during the process of calculation the Dashboard will be able to evaluate the limits for the Metric.
The effective dates are in accordance with the correct time period and that there are available raw data records. Check also that the results are as expected using the business logic scope.

Once the Contract has been committed check whether the activation has commenced successfully and that calculations are progressing as expected.

Follow these steps:

Check that all of the CA Business Service Insight service components have been started (especially the calculation engine, which includes both the PSLWriter and the PenaltyWriter). It is recommended that all service components are running whenever calculation is required.
Diagnose the Contract-the Contract diagnostic feature displays the results of a series of tests performed on all of the Contract's Metrics (and Penalty formulas if they are used). The severity of the test result is provided along with a suggested resolution procedure. It is recommended that a diagnosis is performed whenever activating a Contract, as well as after the calculation for that Contract has completed.
Generate the 'Calculation Status' free-form report. This report is bundled as part of the initial CA Business Service Insight installation, and is located in the 'Admin Reports' bundle folder. It provides information on the calculation progress and can be used at this point to verify whether the PSL engine is progressing and whether calculation has completed. Review this report to evaluate whether there are any potential problems in the calculations.

The report has the following column fields:

Field	Description
Contract	Holds the name of the Contract. The list contains the names of the effective and not effective Contracts.
Metric	holds the name of the Metric within the Contract. The list contains all of the Metrics contained within each Contract.
Tracking Period	holds the Metric calculation period. The list will display an entry for each calculation time unit of the Metric according to the agents that are active and based on the granularity definition of the Metric. In cases where the calculation period is the tracking period, this will be noted.
Updated Up To	holds the last result update time. This indicates that the result for the specific Metric is available up until this date. For example, if 01/01/2006 is shown, it indicates that all of the results for that Metric in that time unit are updated up until this date and that reports are available for it up until this date.
Last Cycle Begin At	holds the time the cycle when the calculation in which the result of the Metric was updated began.
Requires Recalculation From	in cases the engine tags a certain Metric for recalculation and it has still not been updated, the resulting date will appear here specifying the time from which the results are not relevant and therefore require updating. This can occur in any cases of recalculation.
Last Update At	the time at which the Engine updated the record with the last result.
Handled by Engine #	holds the number of the Engine assigned to deal with handling the calculation of the specific Metric.

This report can also provide the following information based on the available raw data:

The time it took the Engine to calculate a single Metric. It is possible to see, by sorting all of the Metrics that were calculated in a single cycle by their updated time, how long it took the engine to update each Metric. All of the records with the same "Last Cycle Begin At" value are calculated during the same cycle and the update time is the "Last Update At" time. It is possible to evaluate the time it took the Engine to calculate the entire Metric with its underlying agent's time units as well as each of the time units.
The time it took the Engine to calculate a complete Contract. This is done by examining the update time of the first Metric of the Contract and the last update time of the last Metric of that Contract, and calculating the time in between.