Sitecore Release Contact Processor

Question

We are facing an issue on our Production environment: the Experience Profile Dashboard is empty. When we look at the logs we found Tracker.IsActive= false and it says that Release contact Processor is skipped.

Can this be the reason that Sitecore Experience Profile DashBoard is empty?

What actually does ReleaseContactProcessor do in the End Analytics Pipeline? Is this the processor which pushes data to the Reporting Db from MongoDB?

Answer 1

There are a few reasons why the ReleaseContact processor might be skipped.

Here is the code for that method:

public void Process(PipelineArgs args)
{
  if (Tracker.Current == null)
  {
    Log.Debug("Tracker is not initialized. ReleaseContact processor is skipped");
  }
  else
  {
    Session session = Tracker.Current.Session;
    Assert.IsNotNull((object) session, "Tracker.Current.Session");
    if (session.TransferInProcess)
      Log.Debug("Contact is being transferred. ReleaseContact processor is skipped");
    else if (session.Contact == null)
      Log.Debug("Contact is null. ReleaseContact processor is skipped");
    else if (session.Settings.IsTransient)
    {
      Log.Debug("Session is in TRANSIENT MODE. ReleaseContact processor is skipped");
    }
    else
    {
      if (session.IsReadOnly)
        return;
      ContactManager contactManager = Factory.CreateObject("tracking/contactManager", true) as ContactManager;
      string message = "tracking/contactManager";
      Assert.IsNotNull((object) contactManager, message);
      Contact contact = session.Contact;
      contactManager.SaveAndReleaseInSharedSessionState(contact);
      session.Contact = (Contact) null;
    }
  }
}

As you can see, if the Tracker is not enabled, a transfer is already in process, the session.Contact is null or session.Settings.IsTransient is true. In any of those situations the processor is skipped. Your log files should tell you which.

Based on your statement that Tracker.IsActive == false my guess is your logs look like this:

5000 15:54:43 DEBUG [Analytics]: Tracker.IsActive == false. EndAnalytics pipeline is terminated

5000 15:54:43 DEBUG Tracker is not initialized. ReleaseContact processor is skipped

In that case check the following settings in your config. They need to both be set to true:

<setting name="Xdb.Enabled" value="true" />
<setting name="Xdb.Tracking.Enabled" value="true" />

Also, make sure that the enableAnalytics attribute on your site definition is not false.

Another thing to check is that you have @Html.Sitecore().VisitorIdentification() in your main layout file.

Hopefully this should get you close.