Time-out for Direct Marketing Tasks in SAS Customer Intelligence 360
The Execution Time-out feature in the Business Context settings has been updated to not just work for Segments Maps, but now also for Direct Marketing tasks.
The purpose of this post is to introduce and promote the expansion of this feature, and how to best apply this setting for your environment.
Considerations for Setting the Time-out Value
The time-out feature for a while now has been used to set a time limit for how long the execution of a Segment Map is allowed to run until it hits the prescribed limit (in hours). At that point in time, execution is set to “Failed” with a message that explains why the occurrence failed. These executions can time-out for various reasons, such as the agent is down, the SAS server is down, or there could be network issues caused by various reasons. The time-out limitation was very helpful to prevent an indefinite or extremely long and costly execution runtime – especially those that can be “stuck”.
Direct Marketing tasks use Segment Maps and can get “stuck” in an execution run for similar reasons. Because Direct Marketing tasks and segments are integrated and work so closely together, that same one setting has been expanded to accommodate both segment maps and direct marketing tasks.
Setting a time-out value prevents segment maps and direct marketing tasks from being kept in a queue indefinitely when a system issue causes the execution of one of these items to not work as expected and fail. Or the time to execute simply exceeds the set time-out limit.
To that point, there are considerations for how to best apply the time limit. There are Direct Marketing tasks that have a dependency on the processing of a segment map - i.e. when a Direct Marketing task is executed, it can be configured to execute a run of the Segment Map it uses (in order to use the most recent data):
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If the execution of a Direct Marketing task depends on the execution on the update of a segment, then the time-out limit needs to accommodate for the execution of both the task and the segment map combined.
A general best practice would be to add at least an extra 30 minutes to the overall time needed to execute both.
Which brings us to the point that if you are currently using the time-out setting, there is now a possibility that your time-out setting needs to be adjusted to accommodate the expansion of this feature.
The time-out setting can be found in Administration -> General Settings -> System Configuration -> Manage Business Contexts. Within Settings of a Business Context, the setting value can be applied within the Options tab:
Each Business Context will have this setting. The minimum limit is 1 hour, and the maximum limit is 48 hours. Please note a default value of 23 hours is automatically applied. You may want to change the default setting to what will work best within your business context in your environment.
Further Considerations
It’s important to realize the on-premises execution is not affected after the time-out limit has been reached. Indeed the item returns to an Active state (with an error), but any associated on-premises execution tasks keep running. This is something the administrator will need to clean up separately. Any results sent to the cloud after the time-out limit is reached gets discarded.
Before this new Direct Marketing task time-out setting became available, a task could get “hung up” and not be usable… until an administrator would notice and then manually click on the “Activate the Non-Responsive Item” button to move the Task from Active to Failed with an error. But now, if the time-out threshold is reached, the task will be automatically moved from Active to Failed and thereby free up the task to be used or executed soon thereafter. No need for an administrator to notice and click the “Activate the Non-Responsive Item” button. This would be important for a scheduled task that may run daily or quite often. This is why the default of 23 hours is helpful because it ensures that items are freed up to continue to work with a daily schedule.
If 23 hours seems more than needed, it is a good idea to lessen that number in order to prevent backlogs when multiple tasks depend on the same segment map. This leads to faster fails and re-tries. But again, give ample time for tasks and segment map executions combined together to set the time-out limit. Some Direct Marketing tasks can take a while to execute if they have process nodes running (which depend on various factors such as the SAS server running, etc).
For more details and information on Direct Marketing tasks, Segment Maps, and Business Contexts, please visit these sites below:
Courses:
- SAS 360 Direct Marketing Tasks
- Building Segments using SAS Customer Intelligence 360
- SAS 360 Direct – Defining the Marketing Data and Business Contexts
Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.
