Chat Server Administration

This page provides general recommendations for the administration of Chat Server. See also the following:

• Matching Contact Attributes
• Multilingual Processing

Limitations

The following table lists recommended limitations for a Genesys Chat solution running on a single host with two Intel Xeon 3.0GHz processors. Observe these limitations for optimum performace (meaning without significant delay).

Item	Maximum
Message size	4 KB (Genesys Desktop limitation; Chat Server does not have this restriction.)
Transcript size	54 KB (Genesys Desktop limitation; Chat Server does not have this restriction.)
Concurrent sessions (in a realistic simple scenario)	1000 per Chat Server
Messages per second	50 (rare temporary peaks up to 150)
Sessions opened and closed per second	10 (rare temporary peaks up to 30)

Chat Server also has a timeout that you can configure using the user-register-timeout option (default value 30 seconds). This is the maximum time between opening a socket and either of the following:

• Receiving a registration over the socket
  
• Receiving a flex packet over the socket
  

This timeout prevents keeping unused connections open.

Connection Delay with Antivirus

It may take some time (up to several minutes on some UNIX Platforms) for Chat Server to connect to an unopened port on a Windows host on which an antivirus program is running. For example, if Chat Server is running on Linux and is trying to connect to an inactive UCS instance, it could take up to three minutes for Chat Server to detect that the listening port is not open.

Chat HA

Deploying a high-availability Chat solution requires some special configuration.

Setting Load Limits

Starting in the 8.5.0 release of Chat Server, you can impose load limits on Chat Server: when Chat Server reaches the specified limit, it no longer creates new sessions or restores existing sessions.

You do this using the following configuration options (full descriptions are in the eServices Options Reference):

• Enable or disable the general functionality of load limitation using limits-control-enabled.
• Set the limits using
  • limit-for-flex-users—Maximum number of currently logged-in flex users.
  • limit-for-sessions—Maximum number of concurrent chat sessions.

  If any of these limits is reached, Chat Server stops creating and restoring sessions.

• If Chat Server is configured in primary/backup mode, you may want to stop it from reporting service unavailable to SCS when a limit is reached. You can do this using limits-reached-report-scs. Blocking the reports avoids a scenario in which Chat Server in primary/backup mode closes a chat session because (1) Chat Server detects disconnection from Interaction Server and/or UCS, (2) it sends a service unavailable notification to Solution Control Server, (3) SCS switches Chat Server to backup, which closes the chat session. (This scenario does not apply if Chat Server is in N+1 mode: multiple Chat Servers with no backup configured).
• Set the point at which Chat Server returns to full functionality using limits-restore-threshold. This value is a percentage of the limit set by the three limit-for-X options.

Example

If limit-for-flex-users is set to 400 and limits-restore-threshold is set to 80, then:

1. When the number of flex users reaches 400, Chat Server stops creating and restoring sessions, and rejects login attempts by flex users.
2. Then when the number of flex users falls to 320, Chat Server returns to full functionality.

Masking Sensitive Data

Chat Server logs and chat transcripts may contain sensitive data such as credit card numbers, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and so on. You can omit this data from logs and mask it in transcripts.

In Logs

To omit sensitive data from logs, you must configure both UCS, as described elsewhere, and Chat Server, as follows:

• In the [settings] section, set message-log-print-size to 0. This means that logs do not show the messages sent between chat participants. Where a message occurs, the log shows [truncated from size=x], where x is the number of characters in the suppressed message.
• In the [log-filter-data] section,
  • Set StructuredText to hide so that logs will omit the transcript that UCS sends to Chat Server.
  • Set Transcript to hide so that logs will omit the transcript that Chat Server sends to UCS.

In Chat Transcripts

	Name	Regular Expression
Credit card	GCTI_CreditCards	8.5.0 version only: (?>^|(?<=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`]))(?>4\d{3}|5[1-5]\d{2}|6011|622[1-9]|64[4-9]\d|65\d{2})[ -]?\d{4}[ -]?\d{4}[ -]?\d{4}(?>$|(?=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`])) 8.5.1 version only: (?>^|(?<=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`]))(?>4\d{3}|5[1-5]\d{2}|6011|622[1-9]|64[4-9]\d|65\d{2})[ -.]?\d{4}[ -.]?\d{4}[ -.]?\d{4}(?>$|(?=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`]))
Social Security Number	GCTI_SSN	(?>^|(?<=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`]))(?!000|666|9)\d{3}[- ]?(?!00)\d{2}[- ]?(?!0000)\d{4}(?>$|(?=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`]))
Phone number using the North American Numbering Plan	GCTI_PhoneNANPA	(?>^|(?<=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`]))(?:\+?1[-. ]?)?(?:\(?[2-9][0-9]{2}\)?[-. ]?)?[2-9][0-9]{2}[-. ]?[0-9]{4}(?>$|(?=[\s[:alpha:](),.:;?!"'`]))

In Typing Preview

Typing preview allows an agent to see text that a customer types before the text is submitted to the chat session. You can have Chat Server mask all digits in the typing preview by setting the typing-preview (called transcript-cleanup-typing before release 8.5.103) option to a value other than none. Chat Server then replaces all digits in the typing preview with the character specified by default-repchar (called transcript-cleanup-mask before release 8.5.103).

Inactivity Monitor

Inactivity monitoring control closes the chat session if there is no activity by chat participants after a certain length of time. To enable it, set the enabled option in the [inactivity-control] section to true. It works as follows:

• Chat Server carries out inactivity monitoring only if there is at least one customer and one agent participating in the chat session.
• If there is no activity during the time specified by timeout-alert, Chat Server issues a warning consisting of the text specified by message-alert. The default warning is "Chat session will be closed soon due to inactivity of chat participants."
• If there is no activity for another timeout-close seconds, Chat Server issues a notification consisting of the text specified by message-close and closes the chat session (thus removing all participants from it). The default notification is "Chat session closed due to inactivity of chat participants."
• If any activity occurs, Chat Server resets both of the timeouts. Activity here means any activity in the chat session that is visible to all participants—so, for example, coaching messages between agents do not count as activity in this sense.