What's new in system administration 8.7
New features for system administration provide your system operation staff with more
options for managing your system and data in Pega Platform.
Enhancements for configuration settings, logging, queue processing, searching and reporting,
and more, increase your administrative power and save administration time. Pega Platform provides the System Settings Guide, a centralized and searchable guide that contains
descriptions of the configuration settings in the system. For example, as a system administrator, you review the Pega log file and find an instance
of the PEGA0019 alert, which indicates that a requestor has
been servicing one interaction for a long time. To learn more about the setting, you
open the System Settings Guide, enter
longrunning in the Search field, and
then select the alerts/longrunningrequests/requesttime
setting from the search results, as shown in the following image. In the setting details, you see that the default value for the setting is
600 seconds (10 minutes). To allow slightly more flexibility
in requestor servicing time, you decide to increase the setting value to
720 seconds. For more information, see Viewing system configuration settings. New features streamline the creation of custom log categories and expand the
options for modifying log levels. You can now create custom log categories in Admin Studio. This change significantly
streamlines the log category setup process by eliminating the
need to switch from Dev Studio to
Admin Studio to create and configure a
log category. The following changes apply when creating
log categories in Admin Studio: The following figure shows searching and creating log categories in Admin Studio You can modify log levels at the system level in Admin Studio. Changes are applied to all
application nodes across the cluster. To open the Modify log levels window, in the
navigation pane, click Resources, and
then click Log categories. Log levels are automatically reset to the default level,
ERROR, after two hours, which helps
prevent excessive logging. You can increase the reset time by up
to 24 hours for individual log categories that require
additional time for debugging purposes. For clarity about when a log level will reset, the duration and
reset time are included on the Log
categories page. More filtering options, such as Operator, are added for filtering
log events. The additional filters enable you to create more
focused logs during debugging. For example, you can select an operator by which to filter log
entries. Log events are then generated for the selected operator
only. The following figure shows the updated Log categories page and
the Modify log level window in Admin Studio: For more information, see Creating custom log categories and
Temporarily changing logging events in log files. New features expand support for case archival and make it easier to adhere to your
data retention policy. After you migrate from embedded Elasticsearch to Search and Reporting Service (SRS),
you can search data that is saved to the Pega Cloud File storage during the case archival
process. During the case archival process, the pyPegaIndexer job indexes the
archived data in Pega Cloud File storage to make it searchable in SRS. You can view the archived data, but cannot modify it unless you first restore it to your
database. For more information, see Improving performance by archiving cases. After updating Pega Platform to version 8.7, the system provides the
option to perform a zero-downtime migration from embedded Elasticsearch to Search and
Reporting Service (SRS). The migration is safe and ensures that the dataset from embedded Elasticsearch becomes
instantaneously available in SRS. The process works in the background and does not
affect users' ongoing work, such as making search queries or managing queue processors.
When the migration finishes, the interface of the search landing page changes to reflect
the SRS functionalities. For example, you can index certain classes to save time and
system resources instead of indexing entire class type. The following image presents an extract from the SRS landing page. Improved indexing
provides users with the option to select a class type, and then index certain classes to
make them available for search. Starting in Pega Platform 8.7, the use of the internal Kafka cluster
as the Stream service is deprecated. On-premises systems that have been updated from
earlier versions of Pega Platform can continue to use Kafka in
embedded mode. However, to ensure future compatibility, do not create any new
environments using embedded Kafka. For information on how to configure Pega Platform to connect to an
external Kafka cluster as the stream provider, see Configuring External Kafka as a Stream service. Read about minor enhancements in Pega Platform version 8.7. When you use the Revalidate and Save utility, you can now select all the rulesets
that the rule type belongs to at the same time. Selecting all rulesets saves you
time when you want to validate multiple rules, in multiple access groups, of a
single rule type. You can select all rulesets for the following rule types: You can now define the context that the system uses to automatically revalidate and
save rules after you update an application. To set the context, you specify the
access group of the application on the Product rule form. Setting the context
ensures that the system revalidates and saves rules with the correct application
permissions. Starting from Pega Platform version 8.7, Search and
Reporting Service provides the functionality to track search queries in the Tracer
tool. When running a report definition, Tracer now shows specific information about
your queries, such as the elapsed time of the query. You can analyze the search
query to identify potential performance issues. For more information, see Viewing Tracer results in the Tracer window. The following changes provide increased insight into memory allocation to help
troubleshoot performance issues that can cause memory problems. For more information, see Using the summary display of Performance Analyzer and PEGA0133: Allocated memory threshold
reached. Pega Platform
now generates alert PEGA0134 when the number of items that are ready to process exceeds
the threshold value configured for the queue processor. The alert message includes
the queue processor name, partition, and other relevant information that a system
administrator needs to troubleshoot the processing backlog. You can configure the PEGA0134 alert for each queue processor. For more information, see PEGA0134: Too many items in ready-to-process
state. Pega Platform now generates alert PEGA0137 when items that are
ready to be processed are not picked up by the queue processor within an expected
length of time. The alert message includes the processor name, partition, and other
relevant information that a system administrator needs to troubleshoot the
performance issue. You can configure the PEGA0137 alert for each queue
processor. For more information, see PEGA0137: Ready-to-process items not picked up by
queue processor. Queue processing now supports automatic handling of large messages that exceed the Kafka default
threshold. Pega queue processing uses the Kafka stream service to queue and delegate
processing. A large message could contain text for an HR email notification, for
example. When Kafka generates an exception for a message larger than the new default of 5MB,
Pega queue processing now automatically saves the original message content in a
large message storage and replaces it with an object reference. This lets the
message enter Kafka queue, but as a small message containing only the link to the
storage location where the actual message content is kept and allows the Kafka flow
to maintain performance. This feature is available by default on Pega Cloud. To make it available in another
environment, you must configure a platform repository. You use new dynamic system
settings to enable or disable the feature, change the name of the large message
repository, and change the default base path in the repository. For more information, see Large message exception handling in queue processing. Centralized and searchable System Settings Guide
Expanded logging capabilities
Searching and creating log categories in Admin
Studio
Feature Description Search log categories On the Log categories page in Admin Studio, you can now search log categories for
specific loggers. Searching log categories for specific loggers
makes it simpler to manage loggers and helps to prevent duplicate
log entries for a logger. Create log categories in Admin Studio
To create log categories in Admin Studio,
from the Log categories page, click . 
Modifying log levels in Admin Studio
Feature Description Modify log levels in Admin Studio Set automatic log level reset period Select additional options for filtering log events 
Increased features and support for case archival
New features for case archival
Feature Description Support for on-premises and client-managed cloud
deployments You can now run the case archival process for on-premises and
client-managed cloud Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and PostgreSQL databases. Use a
supported repository, like the Pega File
system or a client-managed AWS S3, for storing archived data for
on-premises and client-managed cloud deployments. Case exclusion You can now place a hold on stand-alone cases and parent cases to
prevent them from being archived, purged, and expunged from the
database. Placing a hold on a case is useful when the case needs to
be preserved for legal or audit purposes. Remove the hold on the
case to once again include it in the archival process. Other improvements
Description More details included in the Log archival summary More archive details are included in the Log archival summary
class to provide better monitoring of your archival process.
Theme Cosmos support for reviewing archived data Theme Cosmos provides a more consistent and familiar UI for
reviewing archived data. Support of archived case data in Search and Reporting Service
Seamless migration to Search and Reporting Service
Deprecated support for Pega Platform deployments on embedded Kafka
Other enhancements
Support for selecting all rulesets for a rule type in the Revalidate and Save
utility
Support for specifying an access group to revalidate after an update
Support for tracking search queries in Tracer
Increased insight into memory allocation
New queue processing alert: Too many items in ready-to-process state
New queue processing alert: Ready-to-process items not picked up by the queue
processor
Enhancement to queue processing: Automatic handling of large message
exceptions
Previous topic What's new in security 8.7 Next topic What's new in user experience 8.7