Postilion Overview
Transact brings together the various Postilion monitoring elements that are otherwise only available by using a number of different mechanisms. Transact integrates these elements into a single view of the Postilion environment with the data being sourced from the platform, the Postilion framework components and specific information derived directly from individual Postilion transactions.
The Postilion monitoring solution is designed to provide online monitoring and reporting of the Postilion environment, which includes:
Collecting and managing a comprehensive set of status, configuration and performance metrics from the Postilion Realtime Framework. This includes source and sink nodes, response times, queue information, approval and decline rates, system and terminal overviews.
ISO8583 transaction information which is collected in real time from the Postilion Transaction Manager. This also includes analysis and reporting functions.
Postilion status and event information for monitoring and reporting of all events in the Postilion Transaction Manager environment.
Transact collects and brings together metrics and transactional information in the following way:
System and Postilion Framework metrics – Windows Performance Counters injected into the registry by the system and applications.
Postilion System and Terminal Status – derived from the Postilion application database.
The Transaction Scribe
Postilion Transaction monitoring relies on a transaction scribe. The scribe is a java class that is loaded into the Postilion Transaction Manager process and is automatically passed a copy of each transaction by the system. The scribe then passes the transaction over a socket to Transact. The socket operations are undertaken in a separate thread (TxnSendProcessor) so as not to hold up transaction processing.
The initial receiver of the transaction is the Postilion Transaction Log Reader (irpostlr), which translates the Postilion transaction content for processing by the Transact Transaction collectors (Transaction Manager and Transaction Surveillance). The following diagram illustrates this process:
