Business Monitors

[Rajashree]

Hi
I'd like some information about the performance issues when a business monitor is used. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a business monitor?

[AlejandroBarba]

Re: Business Monitors

Hi Rajashree,

The big advantage of the business monitors is that they provide the users the ability to track all the relevant information at a glance and the business monitors can be customized to each user's needs.

Nevertheless, it is going to be hard to give you a straight answer about the performance issues because it depends on a lot of factors as how many business monitors, how many saved queries, how often they are being refreshed, the logic of the saved queries in your business monitors, and so on.

We have not experience performance issues due to business monitors but we do not have that many users and we have noticed that most of them have eventually stopped using the business monitors and prefer to work directly with saved queries.

Hope this is useful,

Alejandro Barba

[cunninghamg]

Re: Business Monitors

Hi Rajashree

Business Monitors can be slow when there are many saved queries, some of which can get pretty complex.

Users won't use them if they take ages to appear.

We have Business Monitors with 24 saved queries that populate within a few seconds. To achieve this level of performance we use Agents to build a binary like string where each character in the string is a different parameter (either positive (1) or negative (0)). This string is updated on each Order during every modification. The saved queries for the BMs just look at the string rather than running complex saved queries.
So the string might look like 10010110.
You might need Position 1, 4 and 6 to be true.
So the query would look like Select order_base_gid from ob_order_base where <Field> like '1__1_1%'
Note the '_' and '%' are wildcard characters.

PS. This also makes exporting the data easier (Possible) for complex queries.

Hope this helps
Gary

[miks]

Re: Business Monitors

This sounds like a neat idea. Do you have an coding examples that show how to build the binary string?

[cunninghamg]

Re: Business Monitors

Sure
In an agent you would assign a variable for each value you wished to use.
For example:
say you wanted to used the shipment status MADE_UP_STATUS_01 which has 5 possible values:
MADE_UP_STATUS_01 VALUE_01
MADE_UP_STATUS_01 VALUE_02
MADE_UP_STATUS_01 VALUE_03
MADE_UP_STATUS_01 VALUE_04
MADE_UP_STATUS_01 VALUE_05

You would give each value an index number say 1 thro 5.

When the agent runs - the variable would be assigned the appropriate index number depending on the status value (by means of a Saved Query)

So..
You may need to do the above step for several variables / statuses (or other criteria).

Next you concatenate the variable values:
$var01 || $var02 || $var03 || $var04 || $var05 || $var06
into the field that you intend to use.
So the value might look like 311421 (not binary as such, I know), so you could then query a shipment with the value like '_1__21%'

You can take it a step further and create more complex parameters such as:
$var01 = 1 where Status in(1,3,4).

Hope this helps
Gary