Unica Discover - Configuring HBR (Health-based Routing) Transport Service Pipeline Agent

In the world of marketing, the customer is a real asset. And to deliver great customer experiences, the marketing team needs to dive right into the customer insights – what they like, when and where to reach out, what people are interested in, and how best to connect. Unica Discover is the offering of Unica Suite that helps you by providing behavioral insight into the online user journey, allowing you to deliver the kind of optimized experience that improves conversion and makes users want to visit again.

In this blog today, we will highlight the Health-based Routing) Transport Service Pipeline Agent of Unica Discover and how you can easily configure it.

Transport service is a 32-bit process. Multiple pipeline agents are running under transport service. HBR is one of the pipeline agents. HBR can run the main process (parent pipeline) and also child pipelines. Original HBR agent has a limitation: parent and child pipelines are sharing the same memory allocation. 32 bits process can utilize up to 2 GB. Often, memory utilization exceeds the 2GB limit, and transport service is restarting or just stays down.

The goal is to –

• Optimize and improve the performance of HBR agent.
• Fully Utilize all hardware (RAM) resources of the machine.

SOLUTION MODULE AND KEY FEATURES

Health-Based Routing enables the routing of hit data to multiple canisters for processing based on the health and load on each canister. Use HBREx agent instead of the original HBR. The Extended HBR session agent (HBREx) implements multiple child pipelines for an individual pipeline in the canister to better utilize memory. This improves the hits processing performance of the pipeline.

The difference between original HBR and Extended HBR (HBREx) is that child pipelines are running separate processes in HBREx and are no longer part of the parent pipeline process. By running the child pipelines as separate processes, each pipeline has extra memory space, which improves the performance of HBR.

STEP-BY-STEP SOLUTION

• Login to the Discover portal as a member of the Admin group and goto: Discover -> Manage Services

• On the right pane, find and expand the config for the HBR server. In the example, it is COMP-770-1.

• Click on “Transport Service configuration…” and then under “Config Actions” on the left, click on “View/Edit (Raw)”:

• It will open the DiscoverCaptureSocket.cfg in a pop-up window.

• In the text, find the [HBREx] section and replace it with something like this one:

Note :

HBREx has all the same fields as HBR, plus the “Child pipeline port range start.” This comes with the default value of 2000. You can edit the value by clicking Child pipeline port range start and applying your changes. Child pipelines are separate processes and need to listen on individual ports. The ports that will be used by child pipelines start from the value specified in the Child pipeline port range start (with a default of 2000). All parameters specified in HBREx will be the same as those specified in HBR.

IMPORTANT:

The CanisterAppName for child pipelines must be specified as DiscoverCSS_<port_number_assigned_to_child_pipeline>. If any other value is specified as the CanisterAppName, it might not work as expected. In the example above, you will see the following:

CanisterAppName1=DiscoverCSS_2001

CanisterAppName2=DiscoverCSS_2002

Also, CanisterName1 and CanisterName2 representing the Canisters where traffic is distributed. In the example above, IP addresses being used. Fully Qualified Domain Names or Netbios names can be used as well if DNS working properly. Another important consideration: make sure that in [SessionRouter] section DownStreamConfigSection pointed to HBREx:

DownStreamConfigSection=HBREx

After making the changes save the updated configuration and restart Transport Service on the HBR machine by clicking “Add Tasks and Submit” on a pop-up window, and you are good to go.

To learn more about Unica Discover, you can reach out to us, and we will be happy to help.