This Boomi Movie has a Happy Ending

While browsing movie categories on my favorite streaming service,

I thought about the experiences of some of our Boomi customers.  You know those movie genres you can scroll through for hours on your favorite streaming service? Drama, comedy, horror, mystery – they all reminded me of the stories we hear from our Boomi customers. Each one a little different, but all full of suspense, surprise, and, thankfully, a happy ending in this case. Grab some popcorn and settle in, because this is one Boomi movie you won’t want to miss.

Background: Business Critical Environment

In a business-critical environment, monitoring Boomi can be a challenge.  At Kitepipe, we know – we work with over 50 Boomi customers every year, and we hear stories of drama, shock, and comedy. The world of Boomi integrations is a rollercoaster, and like any good movie, it's full of ups and downs.

The Drama: Meet Sara

Let’s introduce our heroine, Sara, an Integration Engineer at a leading retail company. Sara’s team has implemented a wide range of Boomi integrations, covering everything from eCommerce to HR, automating most data transformations. But Sara’s day-to-day? Well, it’s getting a bit too thrilling for her liking:

• The surprise when the Operations Manager calls and asks why the eCommerce orders aren’t getting to the warehouse.
• The shock when she realizes that after a routine overnight patch, the nodes didn’t come back up or the schedules didn’t reset, leaving key processes dormant for six hours.
• The creeping suspicion that the Boomi nodes are resource-constrained because a key process runs longer and longer, then freezes.
• The shame when the loan processing team calls and asks about loan documents that have been stuck in a hung process for three days.
• The loud soundtrack of constant Boomi platform alerts – which ones are important?
• The tedium of tracking down issues in the external API gateway – is it a DOS attack? Issues with the third-party processor? Is the Load Balancer down?
• Her laughter when HR asks about a promotions update that happened 60 days ago, never went through, and has been purged from the Boomi logs.

Some Answers: Solutions for Sara

Sara knows that no set of tools and processes can eliminate integration processing problems entirely. But there is a way out of her drama. At Kitepipe, we know a lot about running Boomi, and here are our top three tips for Sara:

1. Good Design: Using best practices in process design and error handling prevents many process and node problems. This is what we do all day, every day, so reach out if your team needs a skills upgrade.
2. Rightsizing and Managing the Boomi Runtime: Atom or molecule, we run a best-in-class hosting service for Boomi customers with significant business-critical integration loads and APIs. Fully managed, monitored, and supported.  If you don't have the internal staff to manage a critical Boomi environment, this might be a good option for you.
3. Better Monitoring Tools: We have filled the monitoring gaps in the Boomi process reporting panel with AtomWatch – our new monitoring tool built specifically for Boomi customers, which we ourselves use in our hosting business.

Sara's Happy Ending

Sara can’t prevent all integration issues, but she can use best-in-class monitoring tools to:

• Predict trends before they become failures
• Filter out the noise and focus on important events
• Know about process issues before users do
• Find root causes and fix them

This movie has a happy ending: Sara gets approval for the attractively priced AtomWatch monitoring tool, and after Kitepipe's white-glove installation and training, she has smart alerts in place. She now sees:

• Hung processes running more than 50% longer than the rolling 2 week average
• Overly large document sets and runtimes, and the trend lines driving them
• Creeping heap and memory problems in the nodes
• Multiple metrics and trends on her most important processes

Sara's drama is over – she’s proactive and ahead of problems and trends.

Conclusion: Avoid Your Own Drama

As long as you’re running mission-critical Boomi integrations, avoid your drama and get AtomWatch. Because in this Boomi movie, everyone deserves a happy ending.

Look for our upcoming Webinar about Atomwatch, and learn how advanced Boomi monitoring works!