How to better triage issues within Rules
- Ben Clark
Alterian CX provides various mechanisms to identify what your rules are doing and where they may be failing.
Within Rule Designer we provide validation messages to highlight current known issues with your Rules.
With the Rule health score in the Rules screen and Opportunities we can highlight when rules are Failing or timing out. Both of these can be due to poor rule design or misconfiguration of the data being passed in.
Reporting per Rule will show when these Timeouts or Failures are taking place so you have a chance to identify a specific cause.
Beyond these mechanisms the best way to identify what is happening “within” a Rule is to use the logging functionality. This is available from the Rules screen and in Rule Designer and is specific to a Rule. The logging will give you detailed information on the fields that are being passed through and the errors that occur.
In most cases the logging is used on conjunction with the Rule API Testing screens. You pass in the values to test the Rule then use the logging to assess what occurred at each point.
To improve the information you can see in the logs especially the fields and the values that are present at each step adding Write to log steps into your rule can provide more detail.
Adding Tracing
Tracing can be turned on within the Rule API Testing screens. This provides two options:
In essence the tracing functionality passes into the logs much fuller information on the fields and the field values. At this point you can choose to see this information at a Step level or a Tile level.
Tile will provide the extra information based on the movement between tiles in your Rule. This will make more sense when looking at your Rule in Rule Designer.
Step will show the enhanced detail based on the movement between Steps. Steps occur WITHIN a Tile and this makes it harder to compare to your Rule and therefore this is likely to be more useful to technical users.