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Create a Holiday Readiness Plan

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Explain what you need to do by month to get your Salesforce B2C Commerce sites ready for the shopping season.
  • Explain the importance of sharing holiday projections with Salesforce customer support.
  • List how you can trigger quota violation notifications.
  • Explain what happens when you disable a quota.

What’s the Plan?

Linda Rosenberg is a senior admin for Cloud Kicks, a high-end sneaker company. She knows how important the holiday season is to her company’s business. Her company's merchandisers are already strategizing for the next season. Getting her system and services ready can’t be a last-minute effort. It’s not just Black Friday that matters anymore; Cyber Week can be the most profitable week of the year.

Linda Rosenberg, Cloud Kicks admin

So how does she get her systems ready and what does she focus on to ensure success? Linda follows our admin best practices to prepare for the shopping season. To start, she takes a look at the timeline leading up to the holiday season. This helps her formulate a plan. With a plan in hand, she can take a deeper dive into the details to make it all happen. Plus, she has the power of Salesforce beside her every step of the way, whether it’s with technical, services, or project management support.

For a general idea of how to strategize for the next holiday season, take a look at the Holiday Promotions Planning with Salesforce B2C Commerce module.

What Are the Timelines?

Her timeline for holiday planning runs from March until November.

Holiday readiness planning spans from March to November.

Here’s her task list for what to do each month.

Month

Tasks

March

  • Meet with Salesforce to align expectations.
  • Review the previous year’s issues or concerns.
  • Review the previous year’s performance.

April

  • Log Center:
    • Review and address code errors. Review the errors and identify where code can be improved to prevent them in the future.
    • Enable alerts to track certain errors or warnings so you can correct them prior to the holidays.

May

  • Jobs framework: Migrate legacy jobs to the jobs framework if you haven’t already to ensure optimal performance during the holidays.
  • Web Services framework: Review web service calls in source code and convert those not using the Web Services framework.
  • Load testing: Plan tests (not necessarily start them). If you plan to use a rental realm, make sure it will be available when you are ready to test.
  • Enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) web application firewall (WAF): Review features and discuss their enablement to help safeguard your sites against malicious traffic. While this is important year round, it’s especially important during the holidays.
    Note: An eCDN is a content delivery network that uses private networks including LANs and WANs for delivering content. A WAF is a specific form of application firewall that filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web service.

June

  • Security: Review these:
    • OCAPI Client IDs
    • IP allowlist/blocklist
    • User permissions
    • Multi-factor authentication (MFA): required for all Salesforce users.
    • 2FA usage for code uploads: required for platform in April 2020
  • Data cleanup: Start planning.

July

  • Quotas and limits: Review and mitigate quota violations identified in Business Manager quota dashboard or from recent quota logs. Proactively addressing this is a best practice.
  • Reports & Dashboards: Review your site’s performance and trends.
  • Link cartridges: Review all LINK cartridges for the right configurations.

August

  • Holiday projections: Review realm peak traffic projections and create the necessary requests for adequate realm sizing.
  • Replication: Review code and data replication processes to follow best practices.
  • Load Testing: Plan load testing. You can also do this in September or October.

September

  • Holiday readiness checkpoint #1: Review your plan and adjust as required.
  • Security: Start defense and mitigation planning.
  • Import/Export: Review import/export folder sizes to ensure they won’t adversely impact performance.

October

  • Web Services framework: Review configurations to ensure optimal or best practice settings for timeouts, circuit breaker limits, and rate limits.
  • Code audit: If your realm was part of a code audit, make sure that all recommended changes are implemented by October.
  • Holiday readiness checkpoint #2: Toward the end of October, perform the final holiday readiness review.

November

  • Code freeze: Freeze the code (typically on November 1 in the USA).
  • Jobs: Review all job schedules to ensure minimal impact to performance.
  • Support: Work with Salesforce. The entire Salesforce team, from support to infrastructure and operations, is focused on and dedicated to the success of your sites during this time.

Share Holiday Projections

It’s important that Linda shares holiday projections with Salesforce Support. They need this info to plan for capacity well in advance of the holiday season. Contacting Salesforce is a two-step process.

  1. Work with your technical account manager (TAM) or customer success manager (CSM) to complete this Google Form. You must submit this form by the end of August for the upcoming holiday season.
  2. As the holiday season approaches, open a proactive support case.

Google Form

Here’s the realm data Linda needs for the Google Form. A realm contains multiple instances on which to develop, test, and deploy a storefront application. Each instance has an application infrastructure that includes web, application, and database servers.

The more details she provides, the more accurate the planning.

  • The realm on which the sale is running
  • Site(s) participating in the sale
  • Start date and time of event for realm (in UTC)
  • End date and time of event for realm (in UTC)
  • Estimated multiplier versus typical hour on realm (for example, “2X normal hourly orders”)
  • Expected traffic distribution (for example, Peak traffic of 50% spike in visits/orders in first 10 minutes)
  • Date of last similar sale (type and peak-hour orders)
  • Expected maximum orders/hour for realm
  • Expected maximum orders/day for realm
  • Expected maximum requests/hour for realm
  • Expected maximum requests/day for realm

She takes a look at the Salesforce B2C Commerce Customer Support Trailhead module to learn how to enter a support case.

Linda has a lot to think about. First and foremost, she wants to eliminate unnecessary stress that might result from the lack of planning. Who wants more stress during the holidays?

She has several big picture projects to plan for, namely, load testing and data cleanup. She wants to review system settings such as quotas, and learn how to use tools to identify problems she can correct prior to the holidays. From hype sales (also known as a high volume or flash sales), she wants to learn some of the other things she can do, whether it’s planning, preventing issues, or troubleshooting when things go wrong. After all, a hype sale is like a mini holiday season.

Quotas and Limits

While July is a great month to check out quotas and limits in preparation for the holidays, Linda’s motto is the earlier the better. Exceeding quotas during high-volume periods is a risky scenario that can degrade a storefront’s stability and performance.

Quotas represent safe platform operating levels that help ensure good performance. Quota status is aggregated across all the application servers of an instance. Some quotas enforce limits that are actually intended to correct performance issues. To make her life easier, Linda configures alert email notifications that report violations. Here are the ways she can trigger notifications.

  • In Business Manager
  • In data objects stored on the storefront, such as catalogues, coupons, and custom objects
  • Via APIs used in custom code

Quota violation alerts give Linda the opportunity to:

  • Review the details
  • Fix configurations
  • Update customizations

In this module, we assume you are a Salesforce B2C Commerce admin with the proper permissions to perform these tasks. If you’re not a B2C Commerce admin, that’s OK. Read along to learn how your merchandiser would take these steps in a staging instance. Don’t try to follow our steps in your Trailhead Playground because B2C Commerce isn’t available in the Trailhead Playground.

If you have a development instance of B2C Commerce, you can try out these steps in your instance. If you don’t have a development instance, ask your manager if there is one that you can use.

Here’s how to configure email notifications in Business Manager.

  1. Open Business Manager.
  2. Click Administration > Operations > Quota Status.
    In Business Manager, enter an email address and select enabled to get quota limit alerts.
  3. Enter an email address (one email address or a comma-separated list).
  4. Select Enabled.
  5. Click Apply. When a quota is violated, an email is sent to the listed recipients.

Disabled Quota

Linda thinks she has a clear business reason to exceed a quota. For example, for a certain sale period, she wants to exceed the number of promotions allowed. Her first step is to open a support case for Salesforce customer support to advise. There’s no guarantee they’ll disable the quota. They have to make sure it won’t risk site stability and scalability.

Customer support can’t increase a quote limit; they can only disable enforcement. Once a quota is unenforced, nothing prevents its value from increasing and potentially causing issues. So how does B2C Commerce calculate quota limits?

For example, Linda already knows about promotions quota violations. One of the junior merchandisers was so excited about a new apparel line that he went overboard creating new ones. Linda learned that even if she disabled certain campaigns and promotions, B2C Commerce includes them in its quota limit check. To reduce their count toward the limit, delete unnecessary campaigns.

Log Center Quota Limits

The Log Center volume quota limit is 1 million messages per realm and instance group per day. Once B2C Commerce exceeds this limit, Log Center doesn’t index any more log messages that day. B2C Commerce still writes logs to the main log files, which are accessible via WebDAV, but not within the Log Center. Here’s what happens when a site reaches the log volume limit.

  1. Salesforce Support proactively notifies you.
  2. You need to review your log messages to determine the underlying cause, and get the issue resolved.
  3. Keep a close eye on DEBUG and WARN messages. They can easily flood the system.

Next Steps

In this unit, you learned the importance of planning for holiday readiness and what to do to get ready. You got started on B2C Commerce tools by exploring quotas and limits. Next, learn about helpful B2C Commerce tools. 

Resources

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