Enterprise Application Monitor

Overview

The Enterprise Application Monitor (EAM) is a system which monitors and records the activities of Eclipsys Sunrise clinical systems. A variety of user activity information and application performance statistics is logged and stored in its repository. A configurable web-based dashboard, reporting, rule-based aggregation, and rule-based alerting and notification systems are included.

EAM may be used to:

• Audit user activity, for fine-grained tracking of medical record accesses for a selectable set of patients, sites, servers, or users.
• Monitor Sunrise clinical application performance, based on the actual time delays during usage activity of the live system. System slowdowns can be detected immediately, and notifications sent to administrators.
• Analyze the usefulness of clinical system initiatives by comparing which documents are being viewed, for how long and by which users.

Platforms Supported

• Sunrise 4.5
• Sunrise 5.0
• Sunrise 5.5

EAM consists of the following components:

• Run-time plug-in components for Sunrise clinical applications (Acute Care, ED, Ambulatory Care, etc.) which use Helios technology to gather application usage and performance information for each workstation or running Sunrise application instance. The gathered information is logged to a Microsoft SQL Server data repository, which is typically separate from the Sunrise database server.
• A web-based configurable dashboard application, which allows the collected data to be viewed in a variety of customizable panels, in real-time or as retrospective views.
• Reports are included, and may used to present performance and usage data in a convenient way.
• A Windows service which collects and aggregates the logged usage and performance information, based on customizable aggregation rules. The aggregated data forms a higher level view of the system activity and health, which is used by the dashboard application, alert rules and reports.
• A fully customizable alerting system, with alert rules which run on a scheduled basis against the logged data and aggregated data. Alerts are stored and may generate notificatons.
• Notifications are delivered via secure email or other supported protocols, according to notification rules.

Features

Real-time Application Performance Monitoring

As the clinical application is being used (by hundreds of even thousands of users), performance information is collected and logged in real time. This includes information about how long tabs take to display, how long MLMs take to execute, how long documents take to display, and many other types of activities. The data is then aggregated and used to trigger alert rules and notifications when the system performance is unusual. System slowdowns can be detected early, and in many cases the problem may be handled before users experience problems.

Audit Tracking Capabilities

User activity may be tracked in various ways, recording the access time and total time open for various dialogs, documents etc. For example, a log entry may be generated each time a user opens a specific document (or any document), with information including the document GUID, the user GUID, the time the document was opened, and the time the document was closed.

Clinical Application Dashboard

Monitor the overall system health at a glance, with a customizable dashboard application that allows individual users (such as administrators) to choose what information they wish to see, and how it should be grouped on screen. A variety of panels allow display using different types of charts, gauges and grids to display the information.

High-level Aggregated Data Repository

As performance and usage data is collected, it is aggregated into a higher level real-time and historical view of system activity. This higher-level repository is ideal for reporting, data analysis and alerting purposes. Data aggregation runs continuously, as the data is collected, based on configurable aggregation rules.

Alerting

As system activity is monitored in real-time, rules which detect potential system problems, security anomolies, or other interesting events can be included in rules which run on a scheduled basis. Alerting rules may generate alerts which are stored in the repository, and which may then trigger notifications to selected administrators.

Notification

When alerts are generated, notification rules determine which administrators or other staff should be notified. Secure email alerts are sent to the appropriate destinations, subject to filtering in the notification rules.

Reporting

Reports can be selected to run on a timed basis or via manual selection from the EAM Dashboard Application. The reports may present data from the aggregated (high-level) view or may report on individual activities from the logged data.