How Flagship Insight Works

Proactive Data Monitoring

Frequently occurring problems caused by issues in your organisation’s data such as bottlenecks, interface failures or unexpected values are identified. Your IT support team creates Test Templates to monitor the underlying data and raise alerts as soon as specific problems arise, such as unexpectedly low warehouse stock levels, payment errors within an online ordering process or out of stock products on your web site, etc.

Additional Diagnostics

Additional Diagnostics are configured to be run on Test Template execution. Those Diagnostics provide a snapshot of the environment at that point in time acting as a valuable support tool, in the analysis and management of Test execution failures.

Alerting

Recovery and/or failure notifications are sent via email, SMS or both to any active Recipient that has subscribed to Alerts for a given Test Template. Alert messages are tailored to a Recipient Type, allowing different types of Recipients, such as business users or technical support staff, to receive different notifications.
Alert messages provide the opportunity to translate a data issue into the impact it has on the business, allowing more effective targeting of the business and technical teams tasked with minimising/mitigating the impact of that issue.

Scheduling

Test Templates can be grouped together for unattended execution at pre-defined times using the built in scheduler or if you prefer, existing scheduling tools already in use within your organisation such as SQL Server Agent, Windows Scheduler or Cron.

Failure Management and Escalation

Members of the IT support team can take ownership of Test failures, managing the issue through to resolution. The number of times a Test is permitted to fail before a Recipient is alerted is configured to support internal escalation processes. For example, first line support might be alerted to a failure immediately, third line support alerted after three failures and the head of department after five.

What Can Flagship Insight Monitor?

Flagship Insight can currently be used to monitor and test data across the data sources listed below:

  • Database: Provides the ability to query OLE DB data sources and databases such as MS SQL Server, SQL Azure and Oracle.
  • Web Content: Provides the ability to query web pages within a site in order to retrieve their content.
  • Web Status: Provides the ability to query web sites in order to retrieve the HTTP Status Code returned by the site when access is attempted.
  • MSMQ Count: Provides the ability to query Microsoft Messaging Queue queues in order to retrieve the count of the number of items on that queue.
  • SalesForce: Provides the ability to query native, custom and packaged objects within a SalesForce environment (org).

We are constantly adding new data connectors, so if a data source you would like to monitor isn't currently supported by Flagship Insight, why not get in touch and request it.