17 March, 2020
A Good Purge is a healthy thing – so is a Keyfax Health-check
Pass the Leeches – A good purge is healthy
The therapeutic use of leeches has a long history. The medicinal leech has three jaws and a hundred teeth. It saws through skin and injects chemicals that dilate the blood vessels to get a better flow of the good stuff: Anticoagulants to stop the blood from clotting and it releases anti-inflammatory (and other compounds) in their saliva that are still not fully understood. Then it starts to suck…
A good purge is a healthy thing – and so is a Keyfax technical Health Check!
As part of your support and maintenance, Keyfax technicians will be connecting into your Keyfax system at least once a year to make sure everything related to your Keyfax application and its database(s) is in the best of health.
“Why” – you might ask?
Although technicians often remote in to customer sites for support purposes, they don’t specifically go ‘looking for trouble’. However, here’s an example where we’re glad they did:
Mr & Mrs Who?
A contact centre was using a back-office tenant named ‘Mr & Mrs Customer Services’ to log jobs where no address was available. After six months when said ‘Mr & Mrs Customer Services’ owned close to 3000 jobs, this had a severe impact on Keyfax History processing. That includes database access, website processing and network traffic – it was sending enormous sets of results to the Keyfax browser.
The Keyfax diagnostic screen took an age to appear, badly impacting the end-user experience. But this was easily overcome by introducing a means of ignoring history for such ‘bucket’ tenant or property references.
Areas where our very own ‘leeches’ could be applied include:
- Performance – is everything running at full pelt? Are there enough memory, CPU & disk resources?
- Archiving jobs – to ensure that history & session archiving is working correctly and is set to correct levels, i.e. databases aren’t getting swollen/bloated
- General checks – by running several analytic SQL queries we can diagnose ‘other issues’
- Error logs – be they application, windows events, IIS or database logs
Rather than produce a lengthy report, if the health check shows up any cause for concern, technicians will advise as appropriate. Some observations may highlight scripting issues/errors and these will be fed back to your Keyfax administrators (assistance can be provided to resolve these if required).
Sounds Risky
The Health Check presents zero-risk or downtime and no changes are made without consent (if required, we can agree with you as to how best to proceed e.g. Change Management approval etc).
We want our customers to rest assured that their Support & Maintenance contract with Omfax represents good value for money and as part of our regular service, establishing this program of Health Checks provides re-assurance.
Simple. You can rest easy knowing we’re looking at this.
And not a leech in sight.
