Monitor Process Engine Pipelines

When monitoring a process engine for bottlenecks, it is useful to look at the queue length of pipelines and the time it takes to process steps between pipelines. Processes in the pipeline queues refresh every 30 seconds.

Process engines use the following pipeline types:

Process Loaded

Defines the number of active processes currently loaded on this process engine. This includes processes with a status of “Running”, “Error”, and “Aborting”, but not those with a status of “Completed” or “Aborted”.

Displayed only in the Internal Engine Queue section.

Event Wait List

Defines the number of step instances that are currently waiting for events, such as a user action to submit a change in CA Clarity PPM. When events registered by some step instances on the Event Wait list come, these step instances are pushed to either the Pre-condition queue or Post-condition Transition queue.

Process engines register only for events they are interested in. For example, if the engine is processing a post-condition for an active project that needs to go to the next step, the engine will register for the Project Update event.

Displayed only in the Internal Engine Queue section.

Retry Wait List

Defines the number of step instances that are waiting to be retried.

When a process engine processes a step instance, the engine may run into database deadlocks. When database deadlocks occur, the engine will place these step instances on the Retry Wait List.

Displayed only in the Internal Engine Queue section.

Pre-condition

Defines the queue length is the number of step instances in the state “Ready to Evaluate Pre-condition” that are waiting to be processed by a Pre-condition pipeline.

Action Execution

Defines the queue length is the number of step instances in the state “Ready to Execute Action” that are waiting to be processed by an Action Execution pipeline.

Post-condition Transition

Defines the queue length is the number of step instances in the state “Ready to Execute Post-condition” that are waiting to be proceed by a Post-condition Transition pipeline.

To simply monitor or clear the pipelines, you can do the following:

View Engine Internal Queues

From the Process Engines page, click a process engine name to view the engine's internal queues page. The Engine Internal Queues page gives status information about the internal queues and the number of pipelines (if applicable).

The following describes pipeline metrics:

Run status icons

Indicates whether the process engine is working.

Total Load

Defines the percentage of processing load across all internal queues.

Last Load Snapshot

Defines the percentage of engine time in the last time window that was used for processing. A time window is a variable time slice driven by many factors, such as load on each engine.

Start Time

Specifies the time when the engine started.

Total Processing Time

Specifies the total time the engine used for processing since the engine start time.

Queue Types

Defines the names of the queue types in the process management infrastructure. The only queue types that you can configure are the pre-condition, action, and post-condition queues.

Queue Length

Defines the number of requests that are currently pending for this queue type.

Number of Pipelines

Defines the number of configured pipelines per queue type.

Manage the Number of Pipelines in Queues

You can add more pipelines to reduce bottlenecks in pipeline queues, or remove pipelines from each queue. You can have up to five pipelines per queue.

To add more pipelines

  1. Select Process Engines from the Data Administration menu.

    The Process Engines page appears.

  2. Click name of the process engine to view pipeline metrics.
  3. Click Configure Pipelines.

    The Configure Pipelines page appears.

  4. Select the number of pipelines for each of the following pipeline queue types:
  5. Click Submit.

    Additional pipelines are added to the queue.