When automat­ing busi­ness processes, it is com­mon to ini­ti­ate processes based upon the com­ple­tion of a trans­fer to that par­tic­u­lar sys­tem – whether the data was trans­ferred by an out­side busi­ness part­ner or cre­ated on another sys­tem in the enterprise.

The com­mon meth­ods are:

• File Watch­ers wait­ing for the file to grow in size for a cer­tain amount of time, and
• Exit codes issued by the client appli­ca­tion that ini­ti­ated the trans­fer of the file

Unfor­tu­nately, both meth­ods are unre­li­able, and count­less hours of pro­duc­tion have been wasted pro­cess­ing incom­plete data before dis­cov­er­ing that either a trans­fer error had occurred or that pro­cess­ing started before the trans­fer had completed.

The only reli­able method of automat­ing busi­ness processes involv­ing file trans­fers trans­fers is by using the infor­ma­tion pro­vided by the file trans­fer server itself.

Automa­tion Poli­cies and Actions

Sen­try Analytics™ mon­i­tors all file trans­fer servers enterprise-​wide in real-​time. Based upon its Automa­tion Poli­cies, it is able to ini­ti­ate Automa­tion Actions on any sup­ported plat­form. Automa­tion Actions can be scripted to exe­cute cus­tom logic. Exam­ples include:

• Noti­fy­ing a job sched­ul­ing sys­tem or BPM tool of the suc­cess­ful arrival of data from an exter­nal partner
• Noti­fy­ing a job sched­ul­ing sys­tem or BPM tool of the suc­cess or fail­ure of a trans­fer ini­ti­ated by that system
• Delet­ing a file imme­di­ately after suc­cess­ful down­load by the recip­i­ent to min­i­mize exposure
• Delet­ing mis­tak­enly uploaded sen­si­tive data imme­di­ately after upload to min­i­mize exposure