Service levels establish priorities among tasks that are waiting to be dispatched.
When the Load Balancer has more tasks to dispatch than the PowerCenter Integration Service can run at the time, the Load Balancer places those tasks in the dispatch queue. When multiple tasks are waiting in the dispatch queue, the Load Balancer uses service levels to determine the order in which to dispatch tasks from the queue.
Service levels are domain properties. Therefore, you can use the same service levels for all repositories in a domain. You create and edit service levels in the domain properties or using
infacmd
.
When you create a service level, a workflow developer can assign it to a workflow in the Workflow Manager. All tasks in a workflow have the same service level. The Load Balancer uses service levels to dispatch tasks from the dispatch queue. For example, you create two service levels:
Service level “Low” has dispatch priority 10 and maximum dispatch wait time 7,200 seconds.
Service level “High” has dispatch priority 2 and maximum dispatch wait time 1,800 seconds.
When multiple tasks are in the dispatch queue, the Load Balancer dispatches tasks with service level High before tasks with service level Low because service level High has a higher dispatch priority. If a task with service level Low waits in the dispatch queue for two hours, the Load Balancer changes its dispatch priority to the maximum priority so that the task does not remain in the dispatch queue indefinitely.
The Administrator tool provides a default service level named Default with a dispatch priority of 5 and maximum dispatch wait time of 1800 seconds. You can update the default service level, but you cannot delete it.
When you remove a service level, the Workflow Manager does not update tasks that use the service level. If a workflow service level does not exist in the domain, the Load Balancer dispatches the tasks with the default service level.