Hyland OnBase supports mission-critical business processes—claims, lending, casework, onboarding, document management, and countless workflows essential to daily operations. But when performance slows, queues get stuck, or background processes fail silently, the ripple effects can halt operations across the business.
That’s why leading organizations are shifting from reactive admin checks to proactive OnBase observability.
With a unified view of system health, workflow behavior, capture throughput, and user experience, organizations can reduce downtime, meet SLAs, and deliver reliable content services at scale.
If you’re responsible for keeping OnBase healthy, you’ve probably already explored general ECM performance best practices and ways to mitigate ECM outages—but observability takes things a step further.
In this article, we break down how to elevate OnBase monitoring into true observability—and how Reveille for Hyland OnBase helps teams keep OnBase continuously available.
Why OnBase Needs Observability (Not Just Monitoring)
Traditional monitoring tools focus on uptime. But OnBase is more complex—it’s a system of systems:
- Workflow engines
- Capture processes
- Unity/Thick clients
- API calls
- App servers
- Background tasks
- Databases
- Integrations
A single slowdown or failure in any layer can trigger:
- User complaints (“OnBase is slow today”)
- Increased ticket volume
- SLA violations
- Missed deadlines
- Workflow backlogs
- Lost productivity
If you’ve read Mastering OnBase: Best Practices for Management and Monitoring, you know that traditional monitoring often stops at infrastructure and high-level availability.
Observability goes further by giving IT deep insight into:
- What’s happening
- Why it’s happening
- Whether it will happen again
- How to fix or prevent it
This shift is essential for organizations using OnBase to support regulated, high-volume, or time-sensitive workflows—exactly the scenarios Hyland describes on its official OnBase product page.
The Core Pillars of OnBase Observability
1. Performance Visibility Across All OnBase Components
True observability requires a granular view into:
- Workflow engine latency
- API responsiveness
- Server and service health
- Batch processing times
- Queue backlogs
- Client performance (Unity, Web, external APIs)
These metrics tell teams where bottlenecks form—and how fast they grow. For a deeper dive into what to track, see Key Performance Metrics for OnBase Optimization.
2. Early Warning for Capture, Workflow, and Integration Issues
Most outages don’t start as outages—they start as small performance degradations.
Examples:
- A scan queue begins backing up
- A workflow step takes longer than expected
- A Web Server CPU spike impacts user response time
- A scheduled process fails silently
- An integration call timeout starts increasing
Hyland itself emphasizes the importance of properly designed workflows and queue behavior in its OnBase Workflow best practices.
By detecting these signals early, teams can fix issues before users notice.
3. SLA Compliance Through Real-Time Tracking
OnBase drives processes with strict deadlines:
- Claims processing
- Loan decisions
- Onboarding workflows
- Accounts payable approvals
- HR casework
- Records compliance
To maintain SLAs, organizations need:
- Real-time workflow step duration tracking
- Alerts on SLA breaches before they occur
- Automatic detection of stuck items
- Historical trends to predict future risks
If you’re interested in the broader impact of downtime on SLAs and compliance, When Document Automation Fails: Root Causes of IDP Downtime walks through similar patterns in IDP environments that also apply to OnBase workflows.
Observability transforms SLAs from “after-the-fact reporting” into continuous performance assurance.
4. User Experience Monitoring
User frustration is often the first sign of a deeper issue.
Observability measures:
- Login failures
- Slow UI load times
- Client-side errors
- Session issues
- Frequent retries or timeouts
If end users can’t work efficiently, neither can the business. For admins, Hyland OnBase Admins: Save Time with Reveille explores how automating these checks dramatically reduces manual effort.
5. Automated Root Cause Analysis
When something goes wrong, IT shouldn’t spend hours hunting for clues.
Observability accelerates MTTR by automatically correlating:
- Spikes in workflow duration
- API slowdowns
- Server resource saturation
- Failed processes
- Integration timeouts
Teams instantly see where the issue started—and how to resolve it. This kind of proactive approach is key to getting ahead of ECM production issues and meeting SLAs.
How Reveille Delivers Complete OnBase Observability
Reveille provides a purpose-built observability layer for OnBase, designed to eliminate blind spots and catch problems before they impact users.
Here’s how Reveille brings deep visibility to every critical OnBase component:
✔ Continuous Health & Performance Monitoring
Reveille monitors:
- Workflow queues
- Workflow step execution times
- API performance
- Background/housekeeping processes
- Capture throughput
- Server and application health
- Repository connectivity
- Unity/Web client behavior
This gives teams a real-time dashboard of OnBase performance. For a more configuration-focused view, Effortless No-Code Monitoring with Reveille for Hyland OnBase covers how quickly OnBase monitoring can be stood up without scripting or agents.
✔ 100+ Out-of-the-Box OnBase-Specific Tests
Reveille provides specialized monitoring tests such as:
- Workflow step duration thresholds
- Stuck or stalled workflows
- Queue backlog detection
- API failure/latency tests
- Database connectivity checks
- User response time tests
- Page load performance
- Document retrieval latency
Reveille’s OnBase offering has evolved over time—from 60+ out-of-the-box tests at launch to 70+ and beyond as highlighted in product press releases and updates.Newswire+2PRWeb+2
These tests catch subtle issues before they turn into escalations.
✔ Proactive SLA Protection
With Reveille, teams can:
- Track SLA-sensitive steps
- Receive alerts when thresholds are met
- Predict future workflow delays
- Prevent SLA misses with automated early warnings
If you’re an MSP or service provider supporting multiple OnBase customers, How MSPs Can Deliver More Value to Hyland OnBase Clients with Service Level Assurance extends this concept into multi-tenant environments.
This transforms operations from reactive to preventative.
✔ Automated Alerts & Diagnostic Insights
Reveille reduces MTTR by correlating:
- Workflow slowdowns
- Server spikes
- App pool failures
- Integration errors
- Capture delays
Teams instantly see the root cause—without sifting through logs.
✔ Audit-Ready Historical Analytics
OnBase customers in regulated industries rely on Reveille to provide:
- Workflow performance trends
- User access/activity logs
- SLA compliance history
- Bottleneck pattern analysis
This is especially valuable in industries like healthcare and life sciences, where case studies like Top-Ranked Cancer Center Eliminates ECM Blind Spots and Restores Workflow Stability show how observability impacts real-world patient care and operational risk.
Benefits of OnBase Observability With Reveille
Organizations using Reveille for OnBase typically report:
- 60–80% fewer user complaints
- 50%+ reduction in ticket volume
- Dramatically improved SLA adherence
- Faster detection and resolution of issues
- Reduced admin time on manual checks
- Greater uptime and platform stability
Reveille effectively becomes a Service Level Assurance layer for OnBase—aligning well with Hyland’s positioning of OnBase as a platform for consistent, high-quality content-driven processes.
Conclusion: OnBase Observability Is Now a Must-Have
As organizations digitize more processes through OnBase, the demands on IT grow exponentially. Manual checks and reactive troubleshooting can’t keep up with modern business requirements.
Proactive observability—powered by a purpose-built platform like Reveille for Hyland OnBase—is the key to maintaining uptime, user satisfaction, and SLA compliance.
It’s how the most efficient OnBase teams stay ahead of problems and ensure the platform performs exactly when it matters most.
