The Activity Report is an essential tool for managing your application because it collects metrics and helps you get a better understanding of your application and performance.

Thank you to Brent Ames, Director, Performance Engineering for his detailed presentation on this topic.

The Activity Report helps you...

• Understand how the application is used, by showing details for application usage and associated user experience over time.
• Improve user experience by identifying user requests and operations that impact application performance.
• Recognize opportunities for further optimization of the application.
• Understand how your application is being used, over several days and down to the hour of the day, by specific user requests, by providing metrics.
• Follow up on issues, the data is presented graphically at a high level, with detailed tabular reports.
• Understand how and when your application changes.

What user metrics are collected in the Activity Report?

1. Feedback requests by user and time

• Shows the times users requested feedback in the last 24 hours

2. Browser version usage

• Shows the variety of browser usage
• If a browser issue occurs, you know if an unsupported browser is being used by checking the supported browsers for EPM Cloud.

3. Application design changes that occurred over the reporting period

• Review the artifact names in the Application Design Changes table
• If performance changes after design changes are implemented, check if the artifacts appear anywhere else in the Activity Report.

4. The number of users who signed into the application each day

• Check the patterns for users and average time in the application for today, the last 7 days, and the last 30 days.
• Further analysis of the Activity Report can help determine if there is a correlation between the number of users and performance.

5. The number of users by time in the application graphically

• The report shows the number of users and how long they spent in the application.  
• The time spent in the application gives you an idea of how much time most users need to perform their activities.

6. The top 10 most active users in the application

• Depending on the groups of users, you may be able to understand where the company is in its process.
• These users use the application the most, so they can provide information on their overall experience of the performance.

7. The bottom 10 least active users in the application

• Depending on the groups of users, you may be able understand where the company is in its process

What metrics are provided for user interface response time?

• Percentage of user interface requests over 10 seconds
  • The user experience chart helps you understand the percentage of users in each category of response time.
  • Any user interface request in the red 60+ second category should be investigated

• Average response time by hour
  • You can analyze the number of users per hour in correlation with the user interface response time.
  • If you see a consistent pattern of exponentially increased user interface response time with a greater number of users, this means that the system may be close to its resource limits under high usage.
  • Research any individual user interface requests taking 60+ seconds.

• Top 7 user interface requests that take the longest amount of time
  • User experience can be visualized quickly based on the types of interactions with the application.
  • The user interactions within the application are broken down into the number of requests and executions, and how long the application took to complete the requests.

• Top 30 longest user interface requests that take over 10 seconds
  • The action with the longest duration time is displayed first on the list.
  • The user interface interaction is further defined by user, time of day execution completed, screen or interface, action completed, object in the interaction, if applicable, and a further breakdown of the duration time by sub-process.
  • Analyzing these metrics helps you identify any actions with slow performance. You can then try these actions on a Test environment for further analysis and optimization.

What business rule and calc script metrics are collected in the Activity Report?

• The business rules attached to a form taking longer than 3 seconds
• The top 10 worst performing business rules over 30 Seconds
• The top 5 worst performing calc scripts commands over 1 minute
• The top 10 calc scripts by duration combined

How do I find the Activity Reports?

• Activity Reports are generated automatically every day.
• To view the Activity Report, sign into your service instance.Click Application, then Activity Reports

 

References:

• Presentation - provided by Brent Ames, Director, Performance Engineering
• Using Activity Reports and Access Logs to Monitor Usage - Documentation
• Supported browsers for EPM Cloud.

 

Information about scheduled maintenance and planned/unplanned outages on EPM Cloud Services can be found on My Services.

Thank you to Vinay Gupta, Consulting Member of the Technical Staff, for information on this topic.

How to Check for Planned Outages:

• Log in to My Services, and click Notifications
• From the drop-down list, select Planned Outage

• From the list of Planned Outages, click a notification to see its details

• Click the forward arrow to see the communication message and view the message sent to the Service Administrators for this planned outage.

 

How to Check for Unplanned Outages

• Log in to My Services, and click Notifications
• From the drop-down list, select General

• From the list of General Communication, click on any communication to see its details

• Click the forward arrow to see the communication message to view the detailed description of the unplanned outage and its root cause and corrective action.

 

REFERENCES:

• Cloud Documentation