MAM 7.6.1.2:

Based on your experience, how often should escalations be run? (without causing issues)

I know running escalations every minute is known to cause issues. But what about 2 minutes? 3 minutes? Etc.
(assuming that the escalation action is fast to execute)
#Maximo
#AssetandFacilitiesManagement

Your last line is critical. To me, an escalation should never run faster than it's likely to complete. If it often takes 5 minutes for your escalation to complete, running it every 1 minute is pointless because it can't do that reliably. This goes for any cron task, not just escalations. I've seen some turn this on for updating KPIs and expect to run it every 5 seconds but it takes 15 minutes to update all their KPIs. If you tell your user it's updating every 5 seconds they'll expect that to be true and it won't be happening. 

Beyond that, in general, I think anything less than 5 minutes means you probably should look at an alternative approach because it seems like you want something in "real time". I've seen some want to automatically progress a record or notify someone after it's created and use an escalation to do that. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You have to run on a high frequency where often times it might do nothing. And it can cause your end users to get an error that the record has been updated by another user because your background process changed the status or made some other change to it while they had the record opened.

If possible, do it interactively as the user (such as via an automation script) to avoid the last issue. If not possible for some reason, investigate using async jobs so that you know you have work to do and can typically make it closer to "real time" than an escalation on a schedule would be.

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Steven Shull
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I'll second what Steven said. We've been making a big push to make any escalation that's been asked to run less than every 15 min (e.g. every 5 min, or every 30 sec) into an automation script OR push back on the original request to have the escalation run outside of every 15 min. The goal is we have the system scan escalations run every 1 hour, 12 hours or 24 hours. 

Part of that has been to re-evaluate some of our older escalations and ask what was the root cause for us to implement the escalation in the first place. Amazing what kind of hoarding we've done over the years because someone asked us for something 8-1/2 years ago. ;-)

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Jason Verly
Reliability Engineering Manager
Agropur US
Le Sueur MN
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Original Message:
Sent: Mon November 22, 2021 09:28 AM
From: Steven Shull
Subject: How often should escalations be run? (without causing issues)

Your last line is critical. To me, an escalation should never run faster than it's likely to complete. If it often takes 5 minutes for your escalation to complete, running it every 1 minute is pointless because it can't do that reliably. This goes for any cron task, not just escalations. I've seen some turn this on for updating KPIs and expect to run it every 5 seconds but it takes 15 minutes to update all their KPIs. If you tell your user it's updating every 5 seconds they'll expect that to be true and it won't be happening. 

Beyond that, in general, I think anything less than 5 minutes means you probably should look at an alternative approach because it seems like you want something in "real time". I've seen some want to automatically progress a record or notify someone after it's created and use an escalation to do that. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You have to run on a high frequency where often times it might do nothing. And it can cause your end users to get an error that the record has been updated by another user because your background process changed the status or made some other change to it while they had the record opened.

If possible, do it interactively as the user (such as via an automation script) to avoid the last issue. If not possible for some reason, investigate using async jobs so that you know you have work to do and can typically make it closer to "real time" than an escalation on a schedule would be.

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Steven Shull
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