File Transfers underpin the day-to-day running of many businesses, and if they fail or are not running as planned, the impact can be significant. While many Managed File Transfer (MFT) tools provide the ability to set up alerts for specific failures, they largely lack a suite of MFT dashboarding and analytics tools that can provide a visual representation of your file transfer infrastructure at a glance.
So, how do you get dashboards and analytics for your Managed File Transfer system? Obviously, you can trawl through log files and perhaps run reports to generate information on volumes of transfers and their success or failure states, but generally speaking this becomes a retrospective view of your system and may leave you in a reactive position rather than a proactive one.
Some file transfer systems include a dashboard that can provide you with information about current and (sometimes) transfers over the previous 24 hours. This real-time view goes some way to help MFT administrators understand whether their system is currently under stress, and may assist them in deciding to stop some workflows to allow others to run. This is, however, back to the reactive not proactive scenario and is not going to help with planning for capacity.
I believe this is one of the reasons that so many of our customers are rightly concerned about the visibility they have over MFT software, either before software selection, or after they have used it for a while and run into capacity or performance issues. Hopefully, in this article, I will highlight some of the things that you should be concerned about, whether you are a seasoned MFT veteran or just at the software selection stage.
While I don't need to explain the basics of dashboarding, it's important to emphasise its importance for MFT administrators. With the right MFT analytics tool, users are given real-time visibility of their file transfer solution, can perform end-to-end monitoring of business processes, track and meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and utilise self-service capabilities, which in turn, reduces costs associated with administration and support. I will explore these benefits in more detail later on in this article.
What is Dashboarding and Analytics for File Transfer?
Dashboarding and Analytics was originally developed and sold as an add-on to Globalscape EFT, a popular MFT software that many people reading this article will be familiar with. It was designed to interrogate the EFT audit database and retrieve information about the movements of files through both workflows and end-user interactions. Since its inception, Dashboarding and Analytics has expanded to allow it to interact with other software too – Progress MOVEit, Coviant Diplomat, and GoAnywhere MFT. This has been possible because the tool primarily needs to interact with the MFT systems database to obtain the necessary information.
What it does that makes it different from the MFT systems is focus on business processes, rather than just thinking of file transfers. You can consider a basic business process as the end-to-end journey of a file from being uploaded into an MFT system to the point where it is delivered to its final destination. This may involve several workflows running consecutively or concurrently, as well as user logins and file uploads – the important distinction to make is that the business determines the process and decides the criticality of it.
Different parts of a business may have their own distinct business processes too, so Dashboarding and Analytics allows for a granular segregation and visibility by organisation, department (“business unit”) or business process. Furthermore, it allows business users to organise by applications and participants. For example, you may have an SAP system defined as an application in the dashboarding tool, which is used by several business units. You can easily see everything that is coming out of or going into that system. Similarly, you may define a third-party warehouse as a participant and refine the reporting dashboard to show everything that goes into or comes out of the warehouse. In this instance, where there may be delivery drivers impacted, it would be useful to see the usage trend over the course of the day.
Here, for example, we can see that after midday the number of files going to and from the warehouse drops off significantly.
Dashboards can be viewed for the whole organisation or individual business units. Additionally, they can be customised for individuals with a wide range of widgets added as required.
The Benefits of Dashboarding and Analytics with your File Transfer Infrastructure
I’ve not yet mentioned what, for me, is the best function of Dashboarding and Analytics. If you take a look at this overview, you can easily see the number of transactions running through an MFT system, each of which allows you to drill down for more information. The panel on the left, however, shows Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
So, what is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in Dashboarding and Analytics? Well, you can create an SLA based upon either a Business Process, or a Participant. In the case of a Participant, the SLA checks how many files are uploaded or downloaded by the participant, over a certain period of time, which could be minutes, hours, days or longer. If the participant transfers less than a preset number of files, the SLA fails (similarly, the SLA could be set to check for more than this number). With MFT Analytics, end users can subscribe to this SLA and receive an alert in case of failure, or a warning that an SLA might fail as it approaches the end of this period, so a proactive resolution can be found in time.
In the same way, a Business Process SLA can ensure that your workflows are delivering data as expected. Why do I like this feature so much? In any MFT system, you can send a notification if a transfer succeeds, fails, or does not transfer any files; in general, this takes the form of a check at the end of a workflow that sends an email. Not only can the SLA offer the same functionality, but it can also raise alerts if the workflow does not run at all. Additionally, the end users themselves can decide which SLAs they need to subscribe to, removing some administration overheads from the MFT administrators.
I mentioned early on that Dashboarding and Analytics will only interact with the auditing database, however, that’s not entirely true. It can, for example, keep an eye on specific directories and raise alerts if files are not collected within a given timeframe.
Dashboarding and Analytics provides a ‘single pane of glass’ view into your file transfer systems. If you have multiple systems, it can manage them all, whether they are production or non-production, or completely different MFT software products altogether. Each is defined as a separate environment and can be displayed or interrogated either individually or collectively, as shown below.
You’ll notice that this image shows a link to ‘Log Locations’. From the Dashboarding and Analytics console, it is possible to not only view what happens in a workflow but also to see the content of the log file without needing to log on to the server. In organisations where multiple systems are deployed, the ‘one-stop shop’ can be a game changer from an operational perspective.
How Easy is it to Connect to a Current MFT Infrastructure?
Dashboarding and Analytics does not need to be installed at the same time as an MFT system. In fact, many of our customers have used their MFT systems for years before deciding to invest in an MFT analytics tool.
Once installed, it is a simple job to provide it with the location of the MFT system (for log access) and its database. It can extract information relating to users and workflows from the MFT database and prepopulate its own database with this information. The Dashboarding and Analytics administrator then defines business processes and selects which users and workflows to include. If it seems challenging, the consultants here at Pro2col can assist you every step of the way, from implementation through configuration.
Conclusion
As businesses grow, the need to track data movements and issues increases faster than most people imagine. Without the visibility provided by a dashboard and analytics tool for file transfer, an MFT system is effectively a black box.
Although having a dashboard and reporting tool is a great first step, being able to give some degree of control back to the business allows them to decide on criticality and notifications, which reduces administration overheads and improves the ability of non-technical staff to understand the status of their workflows.
Dashboarding and Analytics delivers this with an innovative approach to structure and organisation. The flexibility it brings for granular overview of business processes in file transfer makes it an ideal choice for any organisation. Pro2col is here to help you fully leverage this tool, providing expert installation and configuration services to seamlessly integrate Dashboarding and Analytics with your existing or new MFT system.
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About the Author |
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Richard Auger is the Principal Technical Consultant at Pro2col, and has been working in the field of file transfer and middleware for around twenty years. He’s currently Pro2col’s lead Technical Consultant helping clients get the most out of their MFT solution. One of the reasons why Richard loves tech is his curious nature. Tech is constantly evolving, so he is always trying the latest tech releases and testing their limits. |
