ICON Roles

In a contact center that has a large Genesys configuration environment and/or that processes high call volumes, possibly with large amounts of attached data, you can improve Interaction Concentrator performance by deploying multiple ICON instances, each of which collects data only of a certain type.

About Roles

The following are the possible types of data that you can request a given ICON instance to store, in any combination:

• Configuration information—An ICON instance stores the initial contact center configuration state and a history of configuration changes that it retrieves from Configuration Server. ICON stores configuration information about all configuration objects in the environment that are supported by ICON. In a multi-tenant environment, ICON stores configuration information about all of the tenants.
• Interaction-related and party-related information—An ICON instance can store T-Server data that pertains to calls and the parties (connections) associated with those calls. In a multimedia deployment, ICON stores similar Interaction Server data about multimedia interactions (email, chat, and 3rd Party Media).

  The role that enables ICON to capture interaction-related and party-related information is the gcc role (for more information, see the description of the role option). Regardless of whether you have configured the ICON instance to perform this role, if T-Server or Interaction Server is present on the Connections tab of the ICON Application object, ICON will perform aspects of the gcc role, which is required for internal processing in connection with other roles. However, for an ICON instance to be able to store interaction and party information from T-Server or Interaction Server, it must have the gcc role defined.

• Agent state and login session state information—An ICON instance can store T-Server and, if applicable, Interaction Server data that pertains to agent states and agent login sessions.
• Attached data information—An ICON instance can store T-Server and, if applicable, Interaction Server data that pertains to the attached data that is associated with interactions.
• Outbound calls information—In an environment with the Genesys Outbound Contact, an ICON instance can store OCS data that pertains to outbound calls and campaigns.
• License reporting information—In an environment with License Reporting Manager, you can configure a specific instance of ICON to store license reporting data.

In the example shown in the figure above, the ICON instance named ICON 1 handles only the history of configuration changes (configuration data) from Configuration Server. The instance named ICON 2 handles the business data that agents attach to calls and that T-Server includes in TEvents that pertain to those calls (attached data), as well as any other CTI-related data from the same T-Server or Interaction Server. Finally, the instance named ICON 3 handles OCS data only.

Recommended Role Assignments

Genesys recommends the following role assignments in an environment with multiple ICON instances:

• Do not distribute call-related and party-related information, agent state and login-session state information, and attached data information among separate ICON instances. Assign a single ICON instance to write these three data types from a single T-Server.

• In large configuration environments, Genesys recommends dedicating one of the ICON instances to process configuration data (role = cfg) and disabling configuration data processing in the other ICON instances (role = ~cfg). This improves ICON performance on startup, because the initial configuration loading stage can take quite a long time.

• If multiple ICON instances are writing data to the same IDB, ensure that you assign only one ICON instance to write configuration data to the IDB. See the Rules and Restrictions tab.

• For LRM, the recommended approach is to use dedicated ICON instances set to the lrm role. If the ICON instance must be shared with reporting applications, then ICON should be set to the gls and gos roles, which can also support LRM. The lrm role should not be combined with the cfg role.

For the values that enable role assignments, see the description of the role configuration option.

The video below explains how to choose the correct role option values for your environment:

Rules and Restrictions

When you assign ICON roles, observe the following restrictions:

• Two or more instances of ICON that perform the same role(s) cannot store information from the same data source(s) to the same IDB(s).

  For example, if you have two ICONs, each configured to perform the gcc, gud, and gls roles, they can write to the same IDB only if they are connected to different T-Servers or Interaction Servers.

  Conversely, if you have two ICONs, each configured to perform the gcc, gud, and gls roles, they can be connected to the same set of T-Servers or Interaction Servers only if they write to different IDBs. See Login Session Consideration for an alternative option for Interaction Server Cluster.

• Two or more instances of ICON that perform the cfg role cannot store configuration information to the same IDB(s).

• Be aware that the default value of the role option is all.

• If you have more than one instance of ICON writing to the same IDB, you must configure the ICON applications so that only one ICON performs the cfg role.

Role assignments must be configured using only lower case (for example, cfg). ICON interprets uppercase (CFG) or mixed case (Cfg) settings as invalid and defaults to the all role.