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Improving Availability for Session Connections

When agents log into the Siebel application after experiencing browser failure or a dropped connection, session communications may sometimes remain unavailable.

Session communications availability can be considered a performance issue. In addition to affecting agent productivity, loss of availability of session communications wastes server resources that could support other functions.

You can improve session communications availability using the following mechanisms:

• Push Keep Alive driver. Using the Push Keep Alive communications driver pushes empty messages (heartbeat messages) to agents at regular intervals. In this manner, it helps keep the communications push channel alive. This feature can help in environments where enforced timeouts sometimes cause communications session connections to be dropped.

  For example, many customers deploy some kind of network appliance to load-balance Web servers. By default, such network appliances may time out connections to browsers, causing communication interruptions for agents. The Push Keep Alive driver generates periodic traffic so connections do not time out due to inactivity.

  To use the Push Keep Alive driver, you create a driver profile, and specify a heartbeat interval (such as 180 seconds) using the PushKeepAliveTimer driver parameter. Then you add this profile to your communications configurations.

  ChannelCleanupTimer parameter (communications configuration). The ChannelCleanupTimer parameter for communications configurations reduces reconnection delays related to session timeouts. This parameter allows the system to identify when a connection is no longer functioning—for example, due to dropped connections or browser failure.

  NOTE:  If you are using the Push Keep Alive driver, you must also use the ChannelCleanupTimer parameter.

• CommMaxMsgQ and CommReqTimeout parameters (AOM). In addition to setting general application timeouts, setting the AOM parameters CommMaxMsgQ and CommReqTimeout can also help you manage agent connections effectively.
• Backup Communications Session Manager (CommSessionMgr) component. A backup CommSessionMgr component can be specified using communications configuration parameters. The backup CommSessionMgr component runs on another Siebel Server machine and can be accessed without agent interruption in case the primary CommSessionMgr component fails and does not restart.

For more information about using these features, see Siebel Communications Server Administration Guide.