Response and Contact Tracker operation

The Response and Contact Tracker (RCT) is installed in your local environment and communicates with HCL Unica hosted services to retrieve and process data for email contacts, email delivery, and recipient responses, such as link clicks and opens. The RCT must be running in order to retrieve link tracking and email delivery notification data from HCL Unica hosted services .

You can use RCT with or without Kafka. If you do not wish to use Kafka, go to Deliver settings and set the value of IsKafkaEnabled to False. For more information, see Deliver|serverComponentsAndLocations|Kafka|RCT.

Customers can use RCT without Kafka if they don't have required infrastructure support. Without Kafka, RCT will run in single instance mode and process responses sequentially. For faster processing, scaling RCT on multiple instances is recommended by running it with Kafka configured.

If you use RCT with Kafka, it processes the responses independently of download mechanism. When RCT is run for the first time, multiple Kafka topics are created if not already existing. Each type of response is processed using a separate topic per Campaign partition. Each topic has two Kafka partitions and two consumers by default allowing faster response processing even with single instance of RCT. The significance of each topic created for Deliver RCT under RCT with Kafka integration is as follows:

Sl No Topic Name Description Events Processed
1 AP_rct_topic_{partition_name} alert publication Alert notification
2 CT_rct_topic_{partition_name} contact tracker Email, SMS, and WhatsApp message sent events
3 INET_rct_topic_{partition_name} inet response Email Open, Link click, and all responses for SMS and WhatsApp
4 IMT_rct_topic_{partition_name} inbound mail All type of bounce responses (response type 5 to 13)
5 LPT_rct_topic_{partition_name} landing page Landing page form submission
6 MT_rct_topic_{partition_name} mailing tracker Container events
7 MAET_rct_topic_{partition_name} mobile app event All mobile push related events
8 MAKT_rct_topic_{partition_name} mobile app key Mobile app events
9 OT_rct_topic_{partition_name} offer tracker Deliver offer integration
10 TST_rct_topic_{partition_name} treatment set Deliver offer integration
11 TT_rct_topic_{partition_name} treatment tracker Deliver offer integration
12 VT_rct_topic_{partition_name} variation tracker Deliver offer integration
13 EHT_rct_topic_{partition_name} execution history tracker Detailed execution history events

It is recommended to run Kafka as a shared service on separate machine(s) so it is not specific to RCT and can also process messages from other Unica applications like Campaign, Journeys and Interact.

Restart of RCT is required in following conditions:

  1. Execution history flag is toggled
  2. Kafka configurations are changed
  3. Kafka partitions are increased

You must configure Kafka in Unica Platform for the RCT. To access Kafka configurations, complete the following steps. For details on configuring Kafka, see the Configuration properties for Deliver topic.

  1. On Unica Platform, navigate to Settings > Configuration.
  2. Expand the Deliver node.
  3. Navigate to Deliver|serverComponentsAndLocations|Kafka|RCT.
  4. Select RCT.
  5. Select Edit settings.

The following are the mandatory configurations based on CommunicationMechanism value.

In the Kafka configurations page, you can select one of the following values for the CommunicationMechanism field:

  • NO_SASLPLAINTEXT_SSL
  • SASL_PLAINTEXT
  • SSL
  • SASL_PLAINTEXT_SSL

Based on your selection, the following fields become mandatory:

Make the required configurations and click Save.
Note: Due to large size of kafka log files, you may run out of storage and abrupt shut down of kafka server.

Steps to start RCT:

1. Start Zookeper, wait 10 sec

2. Start Kafka

3. Then Start RCT as usual

Steps to stop RCT:

  1. Stop RCT
  2. Stop Kafka
  3. Stop Zookeper

You can start the RCT in either of the following ways.

  • Start the RCT manually
  • Start the RCT as a service
Important: You must start the RCT manually the first time you use Deliver, even if you registered the RCT as a service.

You must restart the RCT when you make changes to configuration properties for Deliver. You can restart the RCT at any time, even if you have configured it to run as a service. HCL Unica hosted services continue to store tracking data if the RCT is shut down or restarting. When it resumes operation, the RCT downloads the queued information.