Outsystems Lifetime Tool – Overview

Outsystem Lifetime is a tool that has been used to manage the entire lifecycle of an application from development to deployment. Using the Lifetime tool we can manage the users of an application, change the Environment settings, analyze the performance, and can manage all the applications that we created using the environment. so in this article, we are going to see an overview of the LifeTime tool so that you can easily use its features.

1. Applications
2. User Management
3. Infrastructure (only in paid plan)
4. Environments
5. Analytics
6. Plugins

Note – For security reasons am not attaching all the images with options that you will have with a paid plan of OutSystems. and also without a valid OutSystems plan, we can’t get all the benefits of Lifetime tools. but I will include all the details in words so you could understand the lifetime tool very well.

On the Home page of the LifeTime tool, you will see the Applications and Environments section as you could see in the given below image. In the applications section, you will see all the applications that you have built and the dependent applications. you can even create a new application from the Lifetime tool. in the environments section, you will see all the environments that you are using for the development. in the paid environment you could not have a home page for the Lifetime.

In the applications section, you will see two options Applications and Deployment Plans. in the applications section, you will see all the applications and defaults applications on which your application is dependent or using the dependencies in your application. you can also see the version and the last update date and time with the name who changed last as you could see in the given below image. in the paid version you could also see the Production environment and the apps that are deployed on the production with all the other details.

In the Deployment plans section, you can deploy your application to the real environment so that users can use your application.

for deployment, you need to create a new deployment plan or you can select a previously created plan. after that, you need to select the source environment and target environment for the deployment and then also need to select the apps that you want to deploy.

Note – Always select the apps that you need to deploy and also the apps on which your apps are dependent that you are deploying.

For the deployment, you need to have a valid premium or paid plan of OutSystems. without the paid plan you can’t deploy your application.

In this User Management section, you can manage the users that are using your application. to use these features you also need a valid plan.

It is a unified interface feature so you can register and manage new users. you can manage access control, and security policies, define roles, grant access, and revoke the roles over the users of your application or your whole environment. you can also define access to the services and applications.

You can create a group of users or teams and authentication mode that users need to follow for registration or log in like the OutSystems built-in authentication or external authentication provider plan and see the list of users with all the features.

This feature or option is only available if you have a paid plan. in this section, you see your development and your production environment. you can check your environment’s health, and configure the environment like Email configuration, SEO URLs, Licensing, etc.

You can also check security settings like enabling HTTP strict transport security, forcing HTTPS for screens in web applications, forcing HTTPS for exposed integration in web applications, setting cookies, and enabling the content security policy.

This option may not be available in the paid version of OutSystems. because it was replaced by Infrastructure. In the Environments section, you can see your development or deployment environment and servers. you can also check for the database and memory used by the application. monitor the logs for an application.

Analytics is used to get real performance insights into an application. it measures exactly the performance users are experiencing when using the applications, from the moment they click until the moment they can work on the result.

You can find out the degrading and upgrading in the performance of an application. using analytics one can be constantly aware of the system’s performance status, and its evolution through time.

In the plugins option, you can create a plugin and install an SDK from the system. these plugins can be used over your all applications and modules.

A lifetime tool is used to see the overall development and entire lifecycle of an application.

To deploy an application in OutSystems one needs to login into the Lifetime tool and go into the Applications section and then go into Deployment Plans and create a deployment plan and execute that.