Three ways to Maintain your RightAngle Environment's Health

Keeping Your RightAngle Environments Healthy

Like anything worth owning, RightAngle requires frequent maintenance to ensure it is performing optimally. Understanding the moving parts and how you can keep them well-oiled is challenging, especially if you haven’t worked with the application very long. Fortunately, we’re here to offer you insight into the top three areas to focus your maintenance efforts. RightAngle is backed by a Microsoft SQL Server database, which will be the primary focus of this hygiene. While there are some best practices on the other architectural pieces (Web Servers and Service Monitor machines), the database is where the regular maintenance can have the largest impact.

Defragmentation of Tables and Indexes

As most IT teams know, any application backed by a database requires some standard database hygiene to keep the environment in tip-top shape. RightAngle is no different. Our first recommendation is to ensure you are utilizing a regularly scheduled job to conduct defragmentation of tables and indexes. In addition, we’d encourage weekly reindexing to ensure the statistics utilized by the SQL Optimizer are choosing the most efficient query plans possible. This simple activity tends to have the largest on-going impact on the day-to-day performance of the environment. While you’re setting up these jobs, we’d encourage you to establish some other processes to monitor table growth, identity column usage (RightAngle is notorious for exhausting some of these), and index fragmentation. Tracking this data can give you a clear picture of your long-term growth rates to allow resource planning for the future.

Proper Data Management

The second piece of hygiene takes us into the application itself. RightAngle is shipped with a framework for purging and archiving unneeded data in the system. From some of the earliest versions, PurgeConfiguration Maintenance has existed to serve this need. Within this piece of the application, you can define SQL tables which require frequent purging to ensure the data is being properly managed. You’ll find the application starts with a standard list of tables the vendor recommends. Those are a great start. We encourage reviewing the retention thresholds of these to ensure they meet your data needs and keep up with your desired table sizes. It is important to ensure the purge entries are in an active state, and most importantly, the purge job is scheduled in Task Scheduler to run with consistent frequency. Generally, a weekly run is sufficient.

Maintain Risk-Related Data Tables

The final piece of establishing a healthy RightAngle environment is maintaining the Risk-related data tables in the system. RightAngle has a built-in separate set of functionalities to manage the purging and archiving of Risk data. The process historically took a snapshot-based approach, purging individual groups of data by snapshot. It was re-written in S20 to introduce purging by Risk record family instead. This method has seen noticeable improvements in performance and in data reduction. You can establish your purge thresholds and retention policies within the control panel settings for this area of the application. After scheduling the job, you should see the data managed with each run of the task. We frequently set this task up to run nightly, purging a small number of Risk records to keep up with the creation in each new month. It is important to also schedule the job specifically created to purge EstimatedAccountDetailCredit records. This table is heavily used byRisk and tends to get turned over frequently. This is not included in the regular Risk purging job; therefore, you should enable the specific task created for this set of data.

Let Us Help You Love RightAngle Again

RightAngle can grow a database rapidly. It is paramount for long-term ownership to actively purge and archive the data involved while keeping your SQL Optimizer happy with up-to-date indexes and statistics. Triarc Support has completed the setup and analysis of these needs for customers across the industry.

For additional assistance or information regarding the configuration and setup of these areas, reach out today. There are more tricks and advanced ways to manage the environment but completing these basic setups will have a huge impact.