Sterling Configurator not launching issue

This is one of the most commonly faced issues while using this product. Even though this product is robustly designed with capabilities to handle an entire order management cycle with powerful tools for customisation, there are few things which kind of irritates me while using this product :-) .One of them is ‘The configurator not launching’ issue. Forget about the configurator, sometimes the java console itself will not appear. I am sharing this trick for anybody who is facing this issue so that this can be of help to them.

Firstly if you are developer and you have a sterling local instance setup. The sterling ‘APP’ will be using the JDK you have set in the environment variables or in the startup script of your server. But the sterling configurator is a java applet and this is launched from IE will actually look for the JRE in your program Files.

Try these tricks if you are having issues launching configurator:

·       1.If you are on older versions of sterling say 7x,8x then your internet explorer will look for Jre6.So copy jre6 Folder to C:\Program Files\Java folder. And restart your IE and it will work.

·      2.  If you are on a higher version of sterling say 9x, then the internet explorer will look for jre7.Try below methods if you are having an issue:

o   Copy jre7 folder to C:\Program Files\Java and then try launching.

o   If above step does not work then downgrade your internet explorer to a very old version say IE8.

Hopefully the above steps should solve the problem for you.If you have any other hacks then please feel free to share in the comments section.

Find the records processed by a Sterling Agent

A Sterling Agent is a java process which is built on sterling agent framework.This framework is one the most important/key feature and a time tested solid feature of sterling Suite. Many of the times we would be interested to know few of the performance parameters of a sterling agent.The scenario can be anything:

1.    An Architect might be interested to know the performance of the agents to tweak the memory footprint,time for getJobs,successful execute jobs etc.

2.    A Sterling support team personnel may be interested to know the how many number of order lines got scheduled,number of orders back ordered last hour.

Or in any scenario if a developer/support team personnel is interested in knowing these statistics there is a simple way to figure this out. YFS_STATISTICS_DETAIL records many key statistics from inside the sterling. 

Below are the steps to find out the key statistics of an Agent:

1.    Determine the time range where you would like to find the statistics:The primary key of this table statistics_detail_key is basically a time stamp. So If i would like to pull the data for the performance of an agent between 01-Jan-2016 ,8 AM and 01-Jan-2016,9 Am then my statistics detail key will be statistics_detail_key>'0101201608' and statistics_detail_key<'0101201609'.

2.    Determine the agent name: You would know to which agent you would like to get the stats.If you are unsure about this then query YFS_FLOW table for the same.Lets say you would like to find number of orders scheduled by scheduling agent.

3.    Determine the statistics tracked for this agent by navigating to knowledge centre here.And then search for the transaction associated with this agent.For scheduling agent ,the transaction associated with it is 'Schedule'.Scroll down until you find the statistics tracked section.

Here you would be interested to know the NumOrdersScheduled statistics.

4.Create the query:

select count(Statistic_value) from yfs_statistics_detail where statistics_detail_key>'From time' and statistics_detail_key<'To time' and server_name='<Your agent name>' and statistic_name='<Statistics Name>';

For this scenario it will be :

select count(Statistic_value) from yfs_statistics_detail where statistics_detail_key>'0101201608' and statistics_detail_key<'0101201609' and server_name='ScheduleOrder' and statistic_name='NumOrdersScehduled';

Note: yfs_statistics_detail  table is a very heavy table and when you fire a query to this table it consumes lot of system resources.Hence try to keep your query as lean as possible,use parallel hints,and try to use it during off business hours.