How can I find out if a file transfer failed?
Organisations transfer data all the time. That might be financial information in the form of invoices, orders and BACs files, or other operational transfers received through a website or shared between internal offices.
If an automated transfer fails it can disrupt business operations and risk breaching service level agreements (SLA) you have in place for that activity. Unfortunately, for many organisations, the first indication that a transfer has not happened, is a call from a user missing the file. By then, it’s usually too late.
That’s why you need good visibility of all your transfers and
alerts set up to notify you if they fail.
Visibility
These systems record events between the server and client, so – with the right module or add ons – you can usually get a detailed level of reporting. This real-time transfer monitoring allows you to keep an eye on the most important transfers as they happen.
A good MFT system will provide the following:
- Real time status of your servers and sites
- Views of transfers in and out of your system
- A dashboard giving key system statistics
- The run history of event rules configured on your system
How you achieve this will depend on your MFT solution and other monitoring systems in your environment. Ideally they will interact, but if this isn’t possible, you could use SNMP traps, or write to a Syslog server. Many monitoring systems read Windows event logs to detect errors, and happily most MFT systems allow this directly. Alternatively you could use a database as an intermediary location for storing monitoring events. Our technical consultants provide professional services to help you if you need it.
Never miss an SLA again
Setting the rule to check before the file is needed gives you advanced warning. So if – for example – an order isn’t sent or payment not made, you have time to contact the sender and address any difficulties before the SLA is breached.
These rules can be set for file names, file sizes or specific senders. You can also track the number of files sent. For example – you can check that at least three files of 100KB or more were uploaded from a specific group of users, with a file name starting ‘finance’.
Why did the transfer fail?
Next steps for your organisation
- You already use an MFT solution
Our technical consultants can advise on how to achieve this level of visibility.
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