Predictive Diagnostics is a Pega best practice to ensure that both business and IT application owners can be proactive in the management and utilization of the applications correcting problems before they start.

What is Predictive Diagnostics?

As part of Pega Platform™, Pega provides a built-in tool called the Predictive Diagnostic Cloud™ (PDC). PDC operates as a secure software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that runs on Pega Cloud and gathers, monitors, and analyzes real-time performance and health indicators from active Pega Platform applications. 

What is the value of Predictive Diagnostics?

Using PDC, you can determine areas that need improvement. You can investigate and respond to unexpected or unwanted behavior of your system. 

The diagram below shows that the PDC tools empower business and IT owners to take the necessary actions to optimize their applications, prioritize fixes that have been identified and even react to potential issues before they become problems.

PDC analyzes and aggregates the data that Pega Platform applications generate to produce trending dashboards. The trending dashboards provide a graphical representation of the following data:

• Daily average response usage
• Interaction volume
• User sessions 

Presenting data in trend graphs helps monitor, isolate, identify, and anticipate issues by presenting behavior over time. The information from the data gives you more control over how Pega Platform operates, helps you optimize its features, maximizes performance, and identifies and resolves your application issues.

When does Predictive Diagnostics take place?

PDC is a service that is relevant from the very beginning, as soon as you start to create your first application.

As you progress through the delivery process, your team will draw on the PDC to support the delivery process and this will continue beyond your go live to include monitoring your production environment.  A variety of roles can benefit from PDC including application owners, IT support engineers and developers.  Your use of  PDC depends on your role and the objective you want to achieve.   The list below provides examples of how each role can use PDC to achieve their goals.

• Application owners and product owners -  Measure the business value that your application delivers and prioritize investments into key areas. PDC can help you understand how users benefit from the application. PDC can provide information on the levels of traffic in the application and identify which features customers use the most. This information can help owners to decide which aspects of the application require further investment to get the most possible business value.
• IT support engineers and operations engineers - Detect issues early by setting automatic notifications in PDC for events critical to your business. They can also predict upcoming issues by detecting anomalies that can lead to failures in your application.
• Developers and performance experts -  Identify issues that affect system stability, reliability, and availability during development. With the holistic view of the application inner workings that PDC provides, they can optimize the application by resolving issues connected to the following areas:
  • Resources
  • Cooperation between Pega Platform components
  • Application design