Outscaling Dashboard

One of the new Outscaling features within iXperion release 1.2 is the Outscaling Dashboard. It replaces the original Server Overview action within the Outscaling Console. The same information is still there, just expand the Server instance properties (just click the plus-icon), but now it contains a lot more information.

Component Status

First of all, the status for each Outscaling component per server instance (both local and remote server instances) is displayed. This includes the Background Component and Event Subscriber for cms server instance(s) and the Endponit listener for publication server instance(s).

When one of the components (for an cms server instance) seems to be not running/inactive, a refresh button is displayed which will restart that component when clicked.

Notice that this will also be the case if e.g. the background component of a remote cms server instance is inactive. Then, clicking the button will cause the local server instance to send an event to the remote cms server instance, containing an instruction to restart the background component. Of course, the remote cms server instance itself must be active, otherwise it can not receive the instruction.

Manually restarting a background component this way isn't necessary however (it's an option), the cms engine itself will monitor the Outscaling background component for inactivity and will restart it when it has been inactive for over 5 minutes.

Second, an overview of the events within Outscaling's EventQueue is shown: the total number of events queued, assigned and events with an error status.

Status per subscriber

Expanding the Status per subcriber (click the plus-icon) will display status information for each subscriber of the selected server instance. This includes events-information, as well as (content) items-information when appropriate.

When there are events with an error status or (content) items that failed to synchronize, a refresh button is available next to the number of failed events/items. Clicking the button will instruct Outscaling to retry the failed events/items (the retrycount for failed events/items will be reset to 0).

If you're interested in the reason of failing, you should select Event Queue Errors (in case of failed events) or Database Sync Errors (in case of items) within the Outscaling Console. Sometimes, the same event/item will fail over and over again, and simply clicking the retry button won't fix the underlying problem. So, once in a while, you should check if there are any failed items/events. If there are, click the retry button and wait a couple of minutes. Then check again, and if there are still failed event/items (and they are the same), you should investigate further what's causing the problem.

Activity Log

Finally, the Outscaling Dashboard displays an Activity Log for each cms server instance. It's in fact just the latest 10 records from the Outscaling Log, however, the Outscaling Log for a remote cms server instance wasn't available before.

The Activity Log is being filled on a subscriber basis. If none of the subscribers of the local server instance does have SixOutscalingII.Logger configured as Outscaling Hook Object, no records will be added to the Outscaling Log (which in fact is the osProgressLog table).

While this is true for iXperion 1.1, there's an extra option available for iXperion 1.2. By setting the registry parameter WriteLogMessagesToProgressLogLevel (within the site's registry key BackgroundComponents\Outscaling) you can instruct Outscaling to write "regular log messages" to the Outscaling Log, whereby "regular log messages" refer to Smartsite logging messages from the "Outscaling" category (Logging\Categories configuration).

And these messages will still be written to the Outscaling Log, event when Smartsite Logging has been disabled.