Best practices are methodical guidelines to get better run-time performance from PowerCenter in addition to better maintainable objects. Proactive enforcement of best practices helps in improving overall efficiency of development, testing, and production phases of a PowerCenter deployment. Proactive monitoring solutions continuously monitor PowerCenter object changes to look for deviations from the best practices. For example, the solution has a rule to verify whether you have set the truncate table option in a session or whether all objects have descriptions.

You might copy the objects across folders for modifications and possibly leave them with same names. Duplicate objects across folders may cause erroneous usage and impact the production runs. The solution continuously monitors for duplicate objects across repository and alerts application architects when it finds a duplicate objects.

The Proactive Monitoring solution checks for workflows, sessions, and mappings that are not valid, and alerts the users. Proactive alerts enables the application architects to know about the objects that are not valid and to take corrective action.

An organization can define naming conventions for PowerCenter objects. You can customize the Proactive Monitoring solution to detect violations in naming conventions and alert the application architects. This enables organizations to audit compliancy of the guidelines and take appropriate action.

The Proactive Monitoring solution checks for disabled sessions and alerts users. Proactive alerts on disabled objects enable application architects to take appropriate action.

Hardcoded values may cause run-time errors as objects move from one environment to another, such as between development to staging and from staging to production. Early detection of hardcoded value prevents errors and saves time in migrating objects between environments. The Proactive Monitoring solution looks for hardcoded source parameters, paths in sessions and workflows, and alerts users when it detects an anomaly.

A special case of hardcoded values check is the check for illegal values. The Proactive Monitoring solution looks for specified commands that you cannot use in the objects and alerts application architects when it detects any deviation.

Frequent changes to objects may not be allowed in certain PowerCenter deployments because of the impact they may cause to other objects in the repository. The solution allows the users to check whether a session has been modified too frequently in a specific period of time and alert.

You can specify multiple attribute to each PowerCenter object. The Proactive Monitoring solution allows you to check for specific attributes on workflows, sessions, and transformations. When it detects a deviation from the defined norm, the Proactive Monitoring solution sends you an alert.