Utilizing the Audiences feature requires several steps to create and send audiences to downstream systems, e.g. Facebook, Yahoo!, Google Analytics, Nielsen. The high-level steps of how and what data is available for defining attributes, how to utilize the attributes to create audiences, and how to select the audiences to send to the downstream systems are described in the article Building an Audience Workflow.
The final step of creating the Attribute Builder, Audience Builder, and Audience Sync apps is to activate the app. As described in each of those articles, the activation step advances the current configuration of the app seen in the development section to the production section of the app. The activation step also creates a scheduled job for the app, which can be configured within the Operations - Configure section of the app, but the job schedules for all audience feature related apps can also be seen and managed within the Activation screen.
This article dives into the details of the Activation screen:
- Navigating to the Activation screen
- Prerequisite configuration
- Audience feature monitoring and maintenance
Navigating to the Activation screen
The Activation page is available from the main menu (
) and then select the submenu item Activation under Audience or, if already within the Audience pages, via the clock icon (
).
As of Syntasa 5.2, the menu and icon are only available to users with the role of System Admin.
The activation screens allow for viewing and updating the schedules for all audience related apps, i.e. attributes, audiences, sync. The optimal setting of these schedules can be reviewed and/or set up by Syntasa staff or the environment's system administrator.
Prerequisite configuration
Before users start building audience related apps the default settings for each type of audience app need to be configured. Failure to do so will lead to an error when users perform the final step, i.e. activation, of building their app.
Under each tab of the activation screens, the Runtime Template and Relative Range sections need to be configured.
Runtime Template
The runtime template drop-down shows those runtimes available from Runtime Overview. The selection here determines the size and configuration of the data processing cluster.
The selected default runtime will be used when users run/test their attribute and audience apps and will be the runtime set for the scheduled job(s) when users activate their apps. The setting of runtime for individual jobs can be overwritten within the app's Operations - Configure screen.
Relative Range
The date range and schedule default of can be set with various options described in the Setting the schedule section of the Operations - Configure article with the exception of the Trigger-Based Schedule option. This option can still be set at the individual job level.
Typically the option chosen here as the default is a daily schedule with the attribute jobs starting after the datasets chosen in the data layer is available; the audience jobs starting after the attribute jobs complete; the sync jobs starting after the audience jobs complete.
Audience feature monitoring and maintenance
The results of the audience data and records sent to downstream systems can be seen and reviewed by the users creating the apps within the apps themselves as described in each app type's article, Attribute Builder, Audience Builder, and Audience Sync, but the continuous processing of this data is dependent on the regularly scheduled jobs succeeding and running in the proper sequence.
Audience Apps page
The Audience Apps page is available from the main menu () and then select the submenu item Apps under Audience or, if already within the Audience module, via the apps icon (
).
Each app card shows the status of and the date and time of the last job run. If the jobs are scheduled to run daily then you would want and expect the green checkmark (
) next to each app's production section with the Last Run date being today or yesterday, depending on when reviewing and when the schedules are set.
From the same apps page, the grid view icon (
) can also be selected to view the same apps in a flattened view along with additional information than can be seen on the card view. From this grid view, the production jobs' Last Run and Job Status can be seen and filtered on Failed if wanting to drill down to issues that may have occurred in the jobs.
Job Tracker
A similar view to the app grid view described above, the audience jobs can also be viewed and monitored via Job Tracker. This page is available from the main menu () and then select the Job Tracker menu item via the heart monitor icon (
).
Job Tracker will show all jobs throughout the application. This can be used to monitor all jobs and/or filtered by module, e.g. audience, to review a subset of jobs.
