With today’s complex distributed systems, even a small change in system architecture or virtual asset behavior can have significant impacts. CTP provides you a number of ways to identify and respond to changes that impact your test environments as well as other key indicators that an asset might not be operating as expected. 

CTP automatically monitors asset health and modifications so that it can alert you to issues that might require your attention. For example:

• A virtual asset was recently modified in Virtualize (e.g., a data group was removed, a performance profile was added, etc.). In this case, you would want to review the component instances you’ve configured and see if modifications are needed.
• A virtual asset is receiving messages that don’t match any responders—or is generating validation error messages. In this case, you would want to have the person who created that asset investigate this problem.
• A virtual component instance is out-of-sync with the actual component it represents (e.g., a service, file, or third-party application whose behavior was "virtualized" is no longer available at its expected location). In this case, you might want to use Virtualize’s change advisor to refactor the virtual asset.
• Custom tests that were configured to validate a component’s functionality are now failing. In that case, you would want to have the responsible parties explore the test failures and investigate the problem.
• A test scenario was recently modified in Virtualize (e.g., a data group was removed, new tests were added, etc.). In this case, you would want to review the component instances you’ve configured to execute these tests and see if modifications are needed.
• You’re configuring an environment configuration that would direct traffic to a "real" component that’s currently offline or that was deleted.

When CTP automatically detects such issues, it flags the environment including that asset (in environment indexes and lists), as well as the specific asset (in the environment diagram).

Alerts are also shown at the system level—for both systems and environments. The system will show the icon for the highest severity health problem identified in its environments. For example, if a system has three environments—one with no health problems, one with a warning, and one with an alert—the system will show the red alert icon. 

The following icons are used to indicate asset health:

If you try to provision an environment with health problems, you will receive a warning message in the lower right-hand corner of the page:

For additional details, click the + button to expand that error message.