Hi,
We occasionally have a Failure on one or two of our Sync’s in Phocas. It would be useful if we could configure an email, to be sent out from inside of Phocas, when certain things fail, like Syncs or Database rebuilds.
Maybe in the Configuration section of Phocas you could create an area which has a time selector + Days of Week tick list for when to send an email, and a semi-colon delimited list of email addresses and a Subject text box.
Optionally, by tick-box maybe, as to whether to always send a report showing all sync and build results, or a selector to only send the email when things have a Failure somewhere. (No one wants another pesky email they have to read all of it, just to figure out if there is a Failure in there somewhere )
It might even be useful for it to email you guys too at Phocas Support, for a period whilst implementing Phocas at a customer site. A bit like the old Health Status used to.
I completely agree, with my client at the moment our only way of detection is by manually going on to either the windows scheduled task or looking at the sync feed in Phocas.
The trick is getting an alert on both failure to send from client side (sync tool) and failure to read on server side (sync feed on Phocas).
I believe with the current sync framework we have, a subscribe button on the sync feed would be the best way to perform this with options about expected delivery times. How it could work
If the client Sync tool was enhanced, we could potentially solve this challenge.
The tool has a configuration tab for each Sync, if that had a schedule that indicated expected sync days and time expected to be available, that can be passed to Phocas. This would then allow Phocas to know when the feeds should have arrived.
With the above configured, this is passed to Phocas and is stored as part of the overall feed settings. This would then allow us to subscribe to the sync feed:
The subscription feed options would be:
Sync Error (anything that failed)
Sync not arrived (Phocas did not receive the streams)
Sync Pending (Sync has partially reloaded)
Sync Successful (email on good sync)
All (all of the above)
No time schedule should be required as its reactive to the dates already configured on the feed.
This is just an idea and please feel free to critique.
If the developers don’t get around to this type of configuration change, I wonder if the PhocasSyncCli.exe (Sync Tool) has some form of return code which could be used to trigger an action, but I would of course prefer something a user can configure in a GUI like you suggest.
Hi,
Thanks, the problem I believe is the current Sync offering is an application rather than a service. This somewhat limits what we can do. Currently the Windows Schedule task has no means of capturing what sync’d and what didn’t. I asked this with Phocas and was led to believe there is nothing meaningful we can hook onto as a return code (Phocas - if I am wrong please let us know!). So that why I thought of the above idea. Push it all onto the server side, not ideal but unless we get a scheduling Sync service version, I am not sure what else we can do as developers at our end.
Hi again @JonKemp,
Another thought which might be cool, is if Phocas could provide the Sync Logs as an available Phocas database, we could setup a Summary chart / Alert off the back of an advanced search, counting where the Error column is True for current period or day.
I have asked for a while now for a User Usage Phocas database. We used to have one setup on our old Phocas website - which was built from the old Vacuum Builds. But Phocas support haven’t sorted that out for us yet (hopefully coming soon). But a Sync Log and an Error Log Phocas Database to analyse could be handy too for “Self Analysis” as it were.
Thanks for an informative post. I created a new internal suggestion for this and linked to an existing conversation to work out the best way forward.
And, yes SyncCLI returns the return codes which are used by internal scripts, but are not exposed.
Thanks again everyone for your comments; we especially appreciate the extra effort that goes into thinking about these suggestions and also the concept images (@JonKemp). As Srujana has mentioned, we’ve logged this internally for discussion. Lots to think about. Did you get the user usage database you were after @richj?
Hi @Tim.Leonard,
I am really enjoying this forum and it’s excellent members and feedback.
It appears that our Usage Database has been built and with luck the Phocas support team will give me access to it soon so I can dig-in I tried to assign it to my User account, but it seems I don’t have authentication just yet. Probably just around the corner!
Yay! I was able to give the database to myself after all
It said “Error, you are not authorised” when presing Save, but it did let me have access. Great stuff support, thank you guys!
@JonKemp, @richj & @david.mciver The Sync & Build failure email notifications are now available in Phocas 8.0.5 release. Please refer the Phocas 8.0.5 release notes for more details.
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I tried to assign it to my User account, but it seems I don’t have authentication just yet. Probably just around the corner!