Watch our video to learn how you can use the UFC FlexiCapture Health Monitor Tool to monitor and review the overall health of your ABBYY FlexiCapture System. Discover how to utilize the “Rules”, “API”, “Performance Counters”, and “Windows Services” functions as well.
Hello. Today I’d like to give you a tour through our ABBYY FlexiCapture Health Monitor Tool. This tool gives us the ability to keep track of our ABBYY FlexiCapture system to ensure that it’s always up and running, and it’s always ready to tackle new documents and batches that are incoming for us to process. This tool essentially gives us the ability to look at a number of different things that we would consider the health of an ABBYY FlexiCapture system by creating what we call “Rules”. And these “Rules” are defined as “API” rules, some service rules, looking at “Performance Counters” and looking at “Windows Services”. So for example, we have the ability to monitor the ABBYY FlexiCapture API, and we can perform different types of API tests on a periodic basis. This is actually one of those critical ways to tell if a system is up and running accurately is by just performing an API call periodically. And that’s actually what we have configured here.
So we can establish a local connection or a connection to the application server. And we can ask the software to perform an API test and monitor this every five minutes. And really what happens here is that this is a very basic call. We call ABBYY through the Web Service API and we’re expecting a session and potentially even some projects to be returned in a very efficient meaning of time. And if that fails, then of course we can log that.
We have other types of rules, including looking at the ABBYY FlexiCapture service on the Processing Server. So we have the ability to kind of see how many cores we have utilized. How many are free. But another cool part about this, is that we can look at the Performance Counters. Behind the scenes in ABBYY FlexiCapture there are counters that tell us very critical things about the status of our application. So when we installed this Health Monitor on the Processing Server, we have access to those counters. So we can, at any point, see the number of free cores. How many cores we’re consuming. We can even see how many tasks are pending and so on and so on. And you can see here, we have quite a list of things we can analyze. The reality is is that at any point we may want to set a threshold. And within this tool, we have the ability to add new rules. So we can say, Hey, if this counter exceeds a certain threshold, and we’re going to pull that every five minutes, for example. So here, we’re going to say, check this counter every five minutes. And if the value exceeds or falls below, or is equal to a certain threshold, then we will monitor and log that as a rule failure.
And so that’s kind of the idea of this application is that we can look at these things that tell us about the health. We obviously can then check the status of our Window Services to make sure that the Processing Server and Processing Station level, we are running efficiently. And at the end of the day, we have these rules that are checked. And when we want to know what happens in the status of these rules, we have logging that happens.
In many environments, we will want to log trace details and then rule violations. So as you can imagine with any application, there’s kind of always ongoing logging that happens. So we can tell the software what to do if we have traces, or if we just literally want to track rule violations. So we can tell the software to log that to a “Text File” or a “Windows Event”, or frankly, “None”. We have different styles of logging to tell us how verbose we want it to be. But we did create a kind of a “Production” default here that only logs typically rule violations to either a “Text File” or “Windows Event Log”, which allows you then to use other reporting and monitoring capabilities to trigger email notifications and things like that. Well, I hope this was a good video. If you have any questions on this, please reach out. Thank you so much.
