Pega Autonomic Event Services (AES) is an application used to closely monitor and precisely assess the performance of your Pega Platform™ applications. You can use the knowledge that AES gives you of the areas that need improvement, to thoroughly investigate and effectively deal with unexpected and unwanted behaviors in your system.

Find the most frequently asked questions about AES and its functionality:

• What is the difference between Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud™ (PDC) and AES?
• What databases does AES support?
• What are the requirements for installing AES?
• Can I upgrade to AES 8.3 from an earlier version?
• Which versions of Pega Platform can I monitor with AES?
• Is AES 8.3 compatible with Pega Platform 8.4?
• Can I use AES to monitor any systems other than my production system?
• How does AES notify me about important events in my system?
• Can I change the time zone for which AES displays data?
• Can I monitor my Pega Platform applications with my current APM tool instead of AES?
• Which system initiates the communication?
• Do monitored nodes send alerts and exceptions through an agent?
• My company frequently generates large data dumps into the PegaRULES log for audit and investigation purposes. Can this affect the operation of AES?

What is the difference between Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud™ (PDC) and AES?

PDC is a service, whereas AES is a licensed application. PDC will always be better software, with better support, at a better price:

• Better software

  PDC receives weekly enhancements and updates. For more information, see What's new in Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud. Development efforts focus on improving PDC. The latest AES version is 8.3, which was released in April 2020 and offers functionality comparable to PDC 2.31.

• Better support

  A dedicated PDC team maintains and fixes problems in the PDC service. Global Client Support engineers and the Customer Success team can access your instance of PDC (unless you specify that this access is restricted) to help you learn about any application and environment issues that PDC identifies.

• Better price

  Pegasystems fully maintains and updates PDC weekly. To run AES, you must pay for and maintain infrastructure (Java, database, application server), and data center chargebacks for servers. Running AES also requires additional staff to install and maintain the application.
  The AES application is made available for a limited group of clients who do not want to or cannot use Pega Cloud® Services, for example, government organizations that are subject to exceptionally strict regulations.

What databases does AES support?

AES 8.3 supports PostgreSQL.

What are the requirements for installing AES?

You install AES 8.3 on a Pega Platform 8.3 system with multitenancy enabled and the required hotfixes installed. For more information, see Installing Pega Autonomic Event Services 8.3 and Pega Autonomic Event Services hotfixes.

Can I upgrade to AES 8.3 from an earlier version?

No, only a first-time installation is possible. For more information, see Installing Pega Autonomic Event Services 8.3.

Which versions of Pega Platform can I monitor with AES?

AES 8.3 can monitor Pega Platform 6.2 and later versions.

Is AES 8.3 compatible with Pega Platform 8.4?

AES 8.3 can monitor Pega Platform 8.4, but you must deploy AES 8.3 on a node that runs Pega Platform 8.3. For more information, see Installing Pega Autonomic Event Services 8.3.

Can I use AES to monitor any systems other than my production system?

AES provides governance and monitoring services for all environments. However, to ensure that the data that AES gathers is correct, you must give each of your systems a unique name. For more information, see Configuring the system name.

How does AES notify me about important events in my system?

You can choose to receive notifications about alerts, exceptions, and other events in your system, as well as periodic summaries of urgent issues. To manage your notification settings, on the right side of the AES header, click the Properties icon >Notifications > Manage notifications.
For more information, see Managing notifications in Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud. Because AES shares most functionality with PDC 2.31, this article applies also to AES.

Can I change the time zone for which AES displays data?

You can change the time zone that PDC uses to display data for your monitored systems by editing your profile settings. To access the settings, on the right side of the AES header, click User Icon > Profile.

Can I monitor my Pega Platform applications with my current APM tool instead of AES or PDC?

AES and PDC provide a low-code Pega perspective of Pega applications, rather than a lower-level Java perspective, which makes working with your Pega Platform easier and more comfortable by automating detection, diagnosis, and even some resolution activities. On the other hand, an APM tool only gives you a perspective on the internals of your application. To learn more, see Why PDC is a better choice for monitoring Pega Platform than your APM tool.

Which system initiates the communication?

AES does not send messages to the monitored systems. Only the monitored systems can send data to AES.

Do monitored nodes send alerts and exceptions through an agent?

AES uses Apache Log4j to implement alerts and exceptions in its messaging infrastructure. An AsyncAppender thread adds the messages to an in-memory queue, and then a thread that runs the Pega SOAP appender processes them.

My company frequently generates large data dumps into the PegaRULES log for audit and investigation purposes. Can this affect the operation of AES?

Because AES has no access to data that Pega Platform writes to the PegaRULES log, the large size of the log does not directly affect AES.