Bionic Rules - Prerequisite Knowledge and Limitations

Prerequisite Knowledge

Before you begin building Bionic Rules in Gainsight, it is helpful to know the following, or to work with your Salesforce Admin to understand:

• Where is your usage data stored and how is it integrated? (Native/SFDC, Matrix/MDA, or Dataspaces)

• What is the usage data loading frequency, granularity, and data week?
  • Weekly or monthly: Determines whether to sum/avg or max/min, and so on.
  • Granularity: User level, instance (product) level, or account level
  • Data week: Sun - Sat, or Mon - Sun

Additionally, you must be familiar with Salesforce and Gainsight objects, to some extent:

• Salesforce objects: Most SFDC objects only contain the present state of data.

• CustomerInfo object: The equivalent of the Account object; it only contains the present state of data. Purpose of CustomerInfo object in Gainsight is to assemble various customer data in one object. During implementation, Gainsight makes a mirror record if your account records on the CustomerInfo object.

• Usage data object: Gainsight's usage data object contains historical data on the usage and engagement measures you choose to track, as well as weekly or monthly snapshots of your current usage data.

• MDA/Matrix Data: In order to access the Data Management console, and be able to view and load data, a user must have access to the Visual Force Page JBCXM.COM.

• Gainsight Objects to Field Map: Navigate to Setup > Installed packages > click JBCXM > View Components. The list of all Apex Classes, VF Pages, Objects and Fields that are part of our Managed Package will be displayed.

Limitations

The following table lists the limitations that are applicable to with all Bionic Rules:

• Each field in every task can have a field label input by the user which will be used as a field alias while querying and as a header in the csv result. While querying from usage data, if any of these field aliases contains reserved keyword, you must modify the Output Field Label name before clicking SAVE, otherwise it displays an error message.

• Merge task does not support filters. 

The following table lists various collections which are supported/not supported in Bionic Rules.

Following are the limits at the fetch level in Bionic Rules:

• Action filter is case sensitive and it does an unresponsive check.
• Rules Preview does not show the detailed information of every task present in Bionic rule. It gives basic information along with the task flow diagram.
• Rules at Account level do not include the absence of data feature. It is not needed as users can create multiple tasks, merge data, and the rule will transform tasks.
• At the Account level, Bionic Rules do not support the Send Email action, since Journey Orchestrator is used for this.
• In Pivot, 50 measures + 200 columns are allowed on 1 Pivoted field.
• Transformation task supports date functions in Group by like Day, Week, Month, Quarter and Year.

Rules Processing 

In order to minimize wait time within the rule queue, as well as reduce sub-optimal rule schedules, the Bionic rules process follows the points listed below:

• Disable Bionic Rules: In the following scenarios, rules are disabled and an email notification is sent to the Admins:

  • Rules which fail to run five times consecutively
  • Any permanent failures such as; if fields are deleted from Salesforce, Malformed Query, and invalid query filter operator.

• Skip other Instances of a Rule in Queue: Gainsight does not add another instance of the rule to the queue if an instance of a Rule is already present in the queue for execution. For example, consider a rule that is scheduled to run every 2 hours. In this rule, if the rule that needs to run at 6 AM is not completed it's run by 8 AM then the rule that's scheduled to run at 8 AM is skipped. If that rule completes its run by 9 AM then the rule which is scheduled to run at 10 AM is not impacted.

Suggestions for an Efficient Rules Setup

Gainsight suggests few recommendations for the admins during the configuration of rules to improve the performance of the rule, minimize the rule run time, and reduce rule failure probability. These suggestions also act as a reminder/guidance for the admins to configure accurate and efficient rules.

The following areas of rule configuration in which Gainsight recommends suggestions to the admins:

• Filters in Tasks: This suggestion is displayed when no filters are added to the tasks. It is recommended to add the filters to fetch only the required data to improve the performance of a rule.

• Date Filters in Tasks: This suggestion is displayed when no date filters are added when the rule is scheduled to run regularly. It is recommended to add a date filter for a rule to fetch only the latest data.

• Unused Tasks: This suggestion is displayed when any data from the tasks is not used anywhere in the rule. Therefore, admins can delete those tasks without any impact to the rule configuration.

The above suggestions are initially displayed on the Schedule screen of the rule setup, after adding at least one dataset to the rule.

Once the rule is scheduled, only the relevant recommendations that are applicable for each dataset are displayed under the Announcement icon (tooltip) on hover in the Setup Rule screen. 

Additional Resources

The following articles walk you through the basic steps to create a Bionic Rule:

• Getting Started with Bionic Rules
• Bionic Rules for Account vs. Relationships
• Bionic Rules Task Creation
• Aggregate Usage Data with Bionic Rules
• Export to S3 from Bionic Rules
• Custom Grouping, Time Series, and Pivoting using Bionic Rules
• Formula Builder in Bionic Rules