Infrastructure Services landing page

Access this landing page by selecting the > Decisioning > Infrastructure > Services  menu item.

The Services configuration allows you to define the connection between Pega 7 and the servers running Adaptive Decision Manager and Visual Business Director. These settings are necessary so that you can perform the actions that require system interaction with the runtime (configuring and using adaptive model rules if the fail safe option is disabled, performing adaptive model management activities, using the VBD Planner, using data sets to manage VBD data sources, running interaction rules that write to VBD, and accessing adaptive model reports). However, with the exception adaptive model rules if the fail safe option is disabled, it is not required when defining Decision Management rules.

This page has two sections:

• Adaptive Decision Manager
• Visual Business Director

Available in applications that have access to the Decision Management rule sets through Application Rulesets or PegaDM as Built on Application.

Define the connection

Typically, the configuration in this landing page is part of the installation process that allows applications to operate with Decision Management functionality. If you do not have ADM or VBD, leave the host and port fields empty.

To define the connection to the Decision Management services:

1. Log in to the Designer Studio as the Pega 7 system architect user defined for your Decision Management enabled application.
2. Open the services configuration and define connection and operational settings for Adaptive Decision Manager and Visual Business Director as explained in the sections below.
3. After defining or changing the necessary settings click Save to save the settings or Save & Ping to save the settings and test the connection to the Decision Management services.

The version of the client library displays at the top and the corresponding server library displays in the Status message for each service. The version follows this pattern:

<Major Version>.<Minor Version>.<Revision>.<Build Number>

Saving settings activates changes in the Decision Management service layer and in Pega 7. If you have not configured the service end point(s), the propagation of data to the corresponding service(s) is turned off.

Adaptive Decision Manager

By default, the external Adaptive Decision Manager is disabled, and your node is using the ADM internal process. This internal process allows you to add adaptive analytics capabilities to your application, but does not persist models at each server restart. To use a persistent analytics engine, you need to configure Pega 7 to connect to Adaptive Decision Manager in the service layer:

• Check if the UpdateAdaptiveModels agent in the Pega-DecisionEngine ruleset is running by going to the Adaptive Decision Manager update agent setting. If it is not, start it.
• Define the name of the server in the Host field and the port number in the Port field.
• Enable the Fail safe option, which is disabled by default. Enabling it activates ADM's fail safe mechanism (preventing loss of responses in case of ADM unavailability). If you enable this option, make sure the database data instance necessary for ADM to operate in this mode exists and that it is configured appropriately:
  • Create a new database instance named PegaADM.
  • Configure the Connection Types as follows:
    • Use JDBC Connection Pool - Recommended. In the server running Pega 7, make sure you have the jdbc/adm7DataSource data source resource. If using a single server, the data source was configured in the process of installing ADM. In production environments, ADM and Pega 7 are typically running on different servers: you need to configure this data source in the server running Pega 7.
    • Use JDBC URL - Configure the JDBC URL to point to the database containing the ADM schema and provide valid credentials to access the ADM schema.

• Configure the operation settings that affect capturing historical data for reporting purposes. In the Adaptive Decision Manager Data mart settings that govern capturing model state and predictor binning, the first option (Unlimited) is required if leveraging model snapshots for time-based reporting (for example, trend detection).

  • The Data Mart agent field shows the status of the ADMSnapshot agent (disabled, or enabled). Click the link to go open the Pega-DecisionEngine's agent schedule data instance where, if applicable, you can change the time interval for triggering the agent (by default, it is 120 seconds) and enable or disable the agent.
    

    • To avoid duplicate snapshots, make sure there is only one node enabled to run the ADMSnapshot agent when working in a multinode Pega 7 environment.

    • By default, the batch size for taking a snapshot is 50, a value considered suitable even in cases of large size models. You can adjust the batch size by changing the admmart/batchSize dynamic system setting in the Pega-ProcessCommander ruleset.

  • Click Update Reporting Data if you want the reports to be based on a newer view of the models and predictors in the ADM system.

  • The Model snapshots options define how the state of the models at a particular point in time is captured and saved. Select Unlimited to never discard snapshots or select Most recent to keep only the most recent state.

  • The Predictor binning snapshots options define how the state of the binning of predictors at a particular point in time is captured and saved. Select Unlimited to never discard snapshots, select Most recent to keep only the most recent state or select None to disable capturing the state of the predictor binning.
    Note: predictor binning snapshots can lead to generating large volumes of data.

Additional settings affect Adaptive Decision Manager. These settings are in the section below Adaptive Decision Manager data mart:

• Pega 7 keeps a local cache of scoring models. Scoring model updates are regularly retrieved from the adaptive data store. The model update frequency is implemented by periodically triggering the UpdateAdaptiveModels agent (Pega-DecisionEngine RuleSet, PegaDM:Administrators access group). The agent runs the pxUpdateModels activity to retrieve model updates. By default, the agent is scheduled to run every 30 seconds. The agent only retrieves scoring models required for executing the strategy and the models that are different from those in the local cache.
  • The Adaptive Decision Manager update agent field shows the status of the UpdateAdaptiveModels agent.
  • In the Adaptive Model update interval field, you can change the time interval.
• Check the Entitled to use Adaptive Decision Manager check box if your software license agreement includes ADM's capability to use predictive data (that is, the ability to define predictors in adaptive model rules).

Visual Business Director

In this section, define the name of the server in the Host field and the port number in the Port field.