The use of the development platform OutSystems is increasing rapidly. The platform offers the possibility to create and start production business applications in a short time. However, in order to fully utilize the unique possibilities of OutSystems it is important to manage the platform properly, an aspect that often not expressed enough. In this article you will find a number of practical maintenance tips to make the most of your OutSystems platform!
Infrastructure
OutSystems runs as a layer on top of an existing infrastructure. This can be servers that run in their own data centres, but virtual environments such as Azure and AWS are also possible. Depending on the chosen party, you are therefore responsible for the maintenance of your infrastructure.
Platform
The biggest bottlenecks, however, arise mainly in the management of the platform itself. This often falls between two pillars. The infrastructure manager sees the maintenance of the OutSystems platform as a task for the application manager and vice versa. Both groups are wrong in this. It’s important to take the necessary steps for which specific knowledge is necessary in each case, otherwise the environment slowly but surely fills up and eventually, the applications slow down or give errors.
The management of the OutSystems platform can be divided into the following sections:
1. Control in ServiceCenter on the various loggings and the “environment health”.
ServiceCenter shows the overall status of the platform. Here you will find the following loggings: Errors, General, Service Actions, Integrations, Processes, Mobile Apps, Environment Health and Security. Each of the logs provides more detail about the events that occurred in that area. ServiceCenter also provides an overview of all modules.
2. Distribution of applications into different application pools
The applications are deployed on a web server in IIS (can this be said in more easily understandable way?). By distributing the applications over multiple application pools, it is possible to reduce application clashing with each other as they request network resources..
3. Keeping and removing old application (versions)
OutSystems offers the possibility to quickly try things out. This can lead to a proliferation of different applications that are no longer in use since they were only deployed as a test. Because of the overview and the space used, it is recommended to run through the applications from time to time and to clean up everything that was once made as a test.
4. Track application analytics (LifeTime)
In LifeTime there is an option to further analyse the applications. An application performance index score per application is shown – known as APDEX. It also shows how the time it takes to display a request is divided into client, network and server time. In this way, a developer can get started to improve the performance of areas that might seem to be underperforming.
Do you want to know more about this subject? Then read the long version of this article (in Dutch) on ITNEXT, the knowledge platform of LINKIT. Or contact author and OutSystems expert Kees Kleybeuker directly for more information.
