Earl Duque

2 minute read

Let’s keep the Rome Release feature highlights going!

Instance Scan, introduced in Quebec, was a great addition to the platform that allowed us to check our instances for issues or deviations from best practices. It is a great tool to use to maintain a high level of standard while doing development, performing releases, and during upgrades.

Before Rome

Instance Scanning was either manual (you executed a scan suite yourself) or scheduled.

In Rome

While scheduling was useful, the best troubleshooting timeline is as soon as possible after something goes wrong. In Rome, instance scan users and admins will be able to create scan triggers that will immediately execute an instance scan whenever the trigger is activated.

How to start

Reactive Scanning is native to the instance scan plugin in Rome and will be included by default. Scan triggers are not part of the application navigator out-of-box but can be found by going directly to the scan_trigger table.

  1. Create a new Scan Trigger (scan_trigger) record and set the trigger type to match the name of the table that has Execution Trackers running that could potentially fail (eg. sys_update_set has an execution tracker that runs whenever you preview an update set)
  2. Go to the Scan Suite table (scan_check_suite or in your app nav go to Instance Scan => Suites) you wish to run when triggered or create a new suite
  3. Add your scan_trigger to the trigger list (on your first try, you might have to add the field to your form if it isn’t there).
  4. Save the Scan Suite record.

Now whenever an Execution Tracker (sys_execution_tracker) record has a Source Table that matches any of the triggers you added to your Scan Suite, the Scan Suite will execute automatically! (What technically happens behind-the-scenes is that the failed execution tracker will create a sys_event record with the event “execution_tracker.failure” and that is what triggers the instance scan).

Common use-case

A very common use-case would be to automatically run an instance scan whenever an update set preview results in problems.

The old message “To commit this update set you must address all problems” can now be automatically researched with a reactive scan!

In the comments, tell us what other ways you might set up reactive scans. Or let us know what custom checks have you made within Instance Scan.


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