You use the interviewing activity report to monitor the current status of the session engines that are responsible for running interviews. Depending on the size of your site and the way it has been set up, you might have one session engine that runs all interviews for all projects, or several engines that share the interview load between them.

When a new interview starts and there is more than one session engine running, UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer generally allocates the interview to the least busy session engine. Your UNICOM Intelligence administrator can control how the system determines which is the least busy engine. Sometimes it will be the engine that is actually doing the least work, at other times engines that are already running interviews for the current project might take precedence over other engines, even if those engines are less busy. This is why you might see new interviews being allocated to engines that are not necessarily the least heavily loaded.

By running the interviewing activity report and regularly updating it to get the latest figures, you can monitor how busy the session engines are and can anticipate possible load problems. The point to bear in mind is that the higher the load (that is, the busier the engine is), the more slowly interviews will run. If an engine reaches or exceeds 100% loading and UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer allocates another interview to it, that interview will fail with a message saying that the server is busy.

The report includes all session engines even if they are not currently registered. This does not always indicate a problem. It might be that an engine has been unregistered for Web (inbound) interviews but can still be used to run telephone interviews.

Sometimes an engine might fail while interviews are in progress. When this happens, those interviews are automatically transferred to a different engine (the respondent or interviewer is not normally aware of this). The report will show that the engine has failed and you will see the information for other engines change accordingly (for example, you might see that a previously unused engine has now taken over some of those interviews).

You can look at interviewing activity in three ways:

The engine status and the project status reports show the current numbers of live and test interviews for each project. If interviews are taking place on projects to which you do not have access, the information about those interviews and projects is summarized in a single “Other Projects” entry.