Over the past 15 years, Celerity has been working closely with clients implementing and optimizing their Adobe Campaign Classic instance. It has provided us with the opportunity to hone and perfect our skills in creating campaign workflows that are simple, easy to replicate, and efficient from a performance perspective. Below is a list of our top workflow creation and maintenance best practices:
Try to maintain a stable level of workflow activity throughout the day and avoid peaks to prevent your instance from overloading. To do so, distribute workflow starting times evenly throughout the day.
Schedule data loads overnight to reduce resource contention.
Long workflows can potentially have an impact on the server and database resources. Split the longest workflows to reduce processing time.
To reduce run times, replace time-consuming activities with simplified and faster activities.
There is a workflow setting that can be used for testing but is often left on after testing is done. The “Generate SQL Logs” setting keeps a plain text record of all SQL calls that are made while the activity is running and stores them in a log which can be viewed on the workflow. These logs can quickly build up and take up a large chunk of space on the database over time. We recommend that this be unchecked on all workflows that are not actively being tested.
Avoid running more than 20 workflows simultaneously. When too many workflows are executed simultaneously, the system can run out of resources and become unstable. Even if you are not reaching the 20 workflows threshold, spread out your workflow execution over time. Staggering the execution of your workflows will ensure better performance of your instance.
In cases where you want to duplicate a workflow, you can do this by going to “Marketing Activities,” hovering over the workflow, and then clicking, “Duplicate element.” Remember, once you have duplicated a workflow, modifications to the original workflow are not carried over to the copy of the workflow.
You can copy and paste activities within the same workflow. However, we do not recommend copying and pasting activities across different workflows. Some settings attached to activities like Deliveries and Scheduler could lead to conflicts and errors while executing the destination workflow. Instead, we recommended you duplicate workflows.
A best practice is to not exceed 100 activities in a single workflow. Having over 100 activities may result in performance issues when configuring your workflow.
While developing your workflow, a name is generated for every activity, as well as for all Adobe Campaign objects. While the name of an activity is generated by ACC and cannot be edited, we recommend labeling it with an explicit name for ease of use amongst your team.
When building workflows, only use one “Scheduler Activity” per branch. If the same branch of a workflow has several schedulers linked to each other, the number of tasks to be executed will be multiplied exponentially, which could overload your database.
When designing a scheduled workflow that includes multiple activities, make sure that the workflow is not rescheduled until it is finished. To do this, configure your workflow to prevent its execution if one or more tasks from a previous execution are still pending.
If you would like more information on how we can help you optimize your Adobe Campaign instance, please feel free to contact Sean Burrell at sean.burrell@celerity-is.com.