SAP BIC Processing Folder Monitoring

[Laurie_Mordick]

Does anyone out there have any methods they utilize to monitor when BIC is not "working"?

I have SCOM alerts set up to monitor the Hyland BIC Service, but have found that to be of little help in determining when indexing is just not running.

I have also set up a daily MANUAL process whereby my off-shore support team RDP to the server, launch the Diagnostic Console and filter for keyword indexing transactions on the Trace tab.  I also have them launch the Thick Client and manually check to see if recent documents (across multiple doc types) are indexed.  I even have them open the BIC Processing folder and observe if the idoc count is decreasing, but all these are manual, performed first this in the morning (5 am every day) and do not catch if BIC stops functioning anytime after 5 am.

I was thinking of writing a script to alert me if the BIC processing folder gets over a certain threshold of files, but thought I would reach out to this community and see if anyone has found a better way.

Thanks so much.  L  🙂

[Cam_Bowers · Accepted solution]

Hi Laurie,

Your ideas for monitoring BIC are all a great start, and I think the script to alert you when the BIC Process folder grows to a certain point is the best method that you mentioned. I'm not sure how your documents are getting created in OnBase, but you could add all new documents to Workflow, and then release them once you check to see if a single keyword (that BIC would update) exists on the document. This would give you an at-a-glance look at how many documents in a single queue do not have their keywords updated yet. I realize that this would also be a manual process to go in and view the document count for the queue to see if it is steadily growing, but unfortunately right now it takes a bit of effort to monitor this processing module. In case you are not aware, on the ArchiveLink admin page there is also a Current BIC Pending Errors tab when you expand "Business Indexing Connector" that will let you see if BIC is erroring out on things like improper IDOC configuration. I hope this helps!

[Cam_Bowers · Accepted solution]

Hi Laurie,

Your ideas for monitoring BIC are all a great start, and I think the script to alert you when the BIC Process folder grows to a certain point is the best method that you mentioned. I'm not sure how your documents are getting created in OnBase, but you could add all new documents to Workflow, and then release them once you check to see if a single keyword (that BIC would update) exists on the document. This would give you an at-a-glance look at how many documents in a single queue do not have their keywords updated yet. I realize that this would also be a manual process to go in and view the document count for the queue to see if it is steadily growing, but unfortunately right now it takes a bit of effort to monitor this processing module. In case you are not aware, on the ArchiveLink admin page there is also a Current BIC Pending Errors tab when you expand "Business Indexing Connector" that will let you see if BIC is erroring out on things like improper IDOC configuration. I hope this helps!

[Laurie_Mordick · Accepted solution]

Thanks Cam - Yes, I am aware of the Current Pending BIC errors tab and to be honest we don't utilize it that much, simply because it is cumbersome to remove the error messages and therefore gets noisy with transactions. 

I do fall back to it and periodically use it when I am trying to troubleshoot why an idoc isn't being consumed.  (Just recently caught that SAP was populating an existing numeric field with an alpha-numeric value)  but Current Pending errors are only written IF the actual BIC process is executing.  Not much assistance in determining if indexing isn't actually happening.

I supposed the idea of setting up workflow could work, but unless I could work in a step where it automatically sends out an alert/email with the count, I'm not sure having the docs queue up within OnBase is an efficient way for us to monitor the activity.

Thanks for the suggestions, looks like I'll be pursuing the custom alerting script on the BIC Processing folder.

Thanks again for responding!  L  🙂

[Cam_Bowers]

Hi Laurie,

I had this question come up again from another customer and I wanted to know if you ever found out a long-term solution for monitoring the BIC Process directory. If you did and would like to share, please let me know. Thank you!

Cam