Published Release Notes

View agent activity and status more efficiently

The Designer Studio > System > Operations menu has been updated with several additional tabs detailing system information pertinent to an active server node running on a system, along with its requestors, log utilities, and purge/archive utilities. The link to the System Management Application tool has also been moved to the Designer Studio > System > Operations menu in this release.

Previously, to understand your system, you had to access every node on your system individually. With this update, the information available on these tabs allows you to view all agents across a cluster to determine if an agent is active and in-depth details about the agent in a more efficient manner.

The System: Operations page displays agent information and status on a system

Access this menu by selecting Designer Studio > System > Operations. For more information, see the System Operations landing page.

View and apply schema changes when upgrading or updating

When you upgrade or update, you can view the schema changes to the default work and history tables and apply the changes to your cloned tables. By applying the changes, you improve performance and can take advantage of the latest reports on those tables.

For information about viewing and applying schema changes as part of the upgrade or update, see the Pega 7 Platform Upgrade Guide or the Pega 7 Platform Update Guide.

For information about using the Designer Studio tool or the command-line tool, see Updating cloned tables after an upgrade or update.

Work attachment indexing fails with IBM SDK Java 6

Indexing of work attachments fails when you use IBM SDK Java 6 with Pega 7.1.7 through Pega 7.2. The workaround is to switch to IBM SDK Java 7 or Oracle JDK Java 1.6. You can also disable attachment indexing from the Search landing page; however, if you do this, you are not be able to search the content of attachments.

Support for an external Elasticsearch cluster for on-premises deployments

On-premises customers can configure an Elasticsearch cluster that is external to the Pega Platform™ by using client-server mode. Using an external search configuration makes Elasticsearch more highly available and scalable. 

You can view the status of your external Elasticsearch service on the Search landing page. For more information, see link to Viewing the status of an external search service.

Requestor pools management in Designer Studio

On the new Requestor Pools landing page, you can view and manage requestor pools across the cluster, including on the current node and remote nodes. By using this landing page, you can tune the requestor pools to improve the performance of services. You can clear the requestor pool for a service package and view the requestor pool basic metrics and configured thresholds.

For more information, see Requestor pools management, Clearing a requestor pool, Viewing details for a requestor pool, Tuning a requestor pool configuration.

New System Queue Management landing page

You can manage your system queues from the new System Queue Management landing page. You can use this landing page to quickly and efficiently debug applications without exiting Designer Studio. In addition to viewing items in a queue, you can defer, remove, and requeue items in a queue, stop items in progress, and view an item's XML.

As a result of this enhancement, the Broken Queue landing page has been removed.

For more information, see System Queue Management landing page.

Node classification

By using the node classification feature, which segregates nodes by their purpose, you can now configure one node with multiple node types. When you start a node with multiple node types, the node runs a set of agents and listeners that are associated with the specified node types. From the Node Classification landing page, you can view and configure the agents associated with node types, view listeners associated with node types, and open Agent rule forms, agent schedules, and Listener rule forms.

For more information, see Node Classification, Configuring node types for agents and listener and Node classification.

Simplified support for external log management systems

Simplified support for external log management systems such as ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) makes it easier to implement an external log management system. An external log management system can improve access to system log files that help diagnose and debug issues by eliminating the need to download log files from each node in the cluster.

For information about configuring ELK, see Configuring ELK for log management.

For information about using Kibana to view log files, see Pega logs in Kibana.

Improved search indexing performance

Search indexing now uses a queue processor to improve indexing performance. Indexing can automatically restart if the database goes down temporarily. This saves time and manual action. As a result of using the queue processor for indexing, the following changes have been made to the Search Landing page.

• You cannot cancel indexing from the Search landing page. Cancel indexing by stopping the queue processor from the Data flow landing page.
• The progress message is not shown. View progress on the Queue Processor landing page.
• Queue processor information has been added.

For more information, see Stopping or pausing search reindexing.

Schema not found error when importing a Rule-Admin-Product file

If you import a Rule-Admin-Product file (RAP) file that includes a schema that has a view, grammar parsing changes can mean that the Pega 7 Platform is unable to find the schema.

To enable the Pega 7 Platform to find the schema:

1. Review the error message that indicates that the schema was not found and identify the following items:
   • The name of the schema that is causing the error
   • The table name in the format: wrong_schema_name.table_name...
   • The DDL that the Pega 7 Platform is trying to apply
2. Use the table name to identify the correct schema name in your system. This schema is usually your data schema, but might also be an external database.
3. Download the DDL.
4. Correct the schema name and save the DDL.
5. Manually apply the DDL.