Data management license entitlement best practices
Adobe Experience Platform is an open system that transforms your data into robust customer profiles that update in real time and uses AI-driven insights to help you to deliver the right experiences across every channel. You can ingress data of varying types, volumes, and histories to Experience Platform using sources and then cater that data to use cases ranging from segmentation and personalization to analytics and machine learning.
Platform offers licenses that establish the number of profiles that you can create and the amount of data that you can bring in. Given the capacity to bring in any source, volume, or history of data, it is possible to exceed your licensing entitlements as your data volumes grow.
This document outlines best practices to follow and tools you can use to better manage your license entitlements with Adobe Experience Platform.
Understanding Adobe Experience Platform data storage
Experience Platform is primarily composed of two data repositories: the data lake and the Profile store.
The data lake primarily serves the following purposes:
- Acts as the staging area for onboarding data into Experience Platform;
- Acts as the long-term data storage for all Experience Platform data;
- Enables use cases such as data analytics and data science.
The Profile store is where customer profiles are created and primarily serves the following purposes:
- Acts as a data storage for profiles that are used to support real-time experiences;
- Enables use cases such as segmentation, activation, and personalization.
License usage license-usage
When you license Experience Platform, you are provided with license usage entitlements that vary depending on SKU:
Addressable Audience - the total number of customer profiles that are contractually allowed in Experience Platform, including both known and pseudonymous profiles.
Profile Richness - the average size of your profile data in Experience Platform. You can increase your Profile Richness entitlement by purchasing a richness pack.
The Profile Richness metric varies depending on the licensing that you purchased. There are two calculations for Profile Richness available:
- The sum of all production data stored within Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (i.e., Real-Time Customer Profile and Identity Service) at any point in time, divided by the Addressable Audience;
- The sum of all data stored within Platform (including, but not limited to the data lake, Real-Time Customer Profile, and Identity Service) at any point in time and any data that you stream through (instead of storing within) Platform in the past 12 months, divided by the Addressable Audience.
The availability of these metrics and the specific definition of each of these metrics varies depending on the licensing that your organization has purchased.
License usage dashboard
The Adobe Experience Platform UI provides a dashboard through which you can view a snapshot of your organization’s license-related data for Platform. The data in the dashboard is displayed exactly as it appears at the specific point in time when the snapshot was taken. The snapshot is neither an approximation nor a sample of data, and the dashboard is not updating in real-time.
For more information, see the guide on using the license usage dashboard on Platform UI.
Data management best practices
The following sections outline best practices to follow to better manage your data.
Understanding your data
Not all data is the same in Adobe Experience Platform. Some data may be dense, but low in value, while others may be sparse, but high in value. Some data may lose value as soon as its generated, while others may be valuable for months, if not years.
There are three dimensions to consider in understanding the value of your data:
Data Management tools data-management-tools
There are two central scenarios to consider when ensuring that your data usage remains within your license entitlement limits:
What data to bring into Platform?
Data can be ingested into one or multiple systems in Platform, namely the data lake and/or the Profile store. This means that different data can exist in both systems for a variety of different use cases. For example, you may want to hold historical data in the data lake, but not in the Profile store. You can select which data to send to the Profile store by enabling a dataset for Profile ingestion.
What data to keep?
You can apply both data ingestion filters and expiration rules to remove data that has become obsolete for your use cases. Typically, behavioral data (such as Analytics data) consumes significantly more storage than record data (such as CRM data). For example, many Platform users have upwards of up to 90% of profiles being populated by behavioral data alone, in comparison to that of record data. Therefore, managing your behavioral data is critical in ensuring compliance within your license entitlements.
There are a number of tools that you can leverage to stay within your license usage entitlements:
Identity Service and addressable audience identity-service
Identity graphs do not count towards your total addressable audience entitlement because addressable audience refers to your total count of customer profiles.
However, identity graph limits can affect your addressable audience due to splitting identities. For example, if the oldest ECID is removed from the graph, ECID will continue to exist in Real-Time Customer Profile as a pseudonymous profile. You can set Pseudonymous profile data expirations to circumvent this behavior. For more information, read the guardrails for Identity Service data.
Ingestion filters ingestion-filters
Ingestion filters allow you to bring in only the data that is needed for your use cases and filters out all events that are not required.
Profile store profile-service
The Profile store is composed of the following components:
Profile store Composition Reports
There are a number of reports available to help you understand the composition of the Profile store. These reports help you make informed decisions about how and where to set your Experience Event expirations to better optimize your license usage:
- Dataset Overlap Report API: Exposes the datasets that contribute the most to your Addressable Audience. You can use this report to identify which ExperienceEvent datasets to set an expiration for. See the tutorial on generating the dataset overlap report for more information.
- Identity Overlap Report API: Exposes the identity namespaces that contribute the most to your Addressable Audience. See the tutorial on generating the identity overlap report for more information.
Pseudonymous Profile data expirations pseudonymous-profile-expirations
This capability allows you to automatically remove stale Pseudonymous Profiles from the Profile Store. For more information on this feature, please read the Pseudonymous Profile data expiration overview.
Experience Event expirations event-expirations
This capability allows you to automatically remove behavioral data from a Profile-enabled dataset that is no longer valuable for your use cases. See the overview on Experience Event expirations for details on how this process works once it is enabled for a dataset.
Summary of best practices for license usage compliancy best-practices
The following is a list of some recommended best practices that you can follow to ensure better adherence to your license usage entitlement:
- Use the license usage dashboard to track and monitor customer usage trends. This allows you to get ahead of any potential overages that may incur.
- Configure ingestion filters by identifying the events required for your segmentation and personalization use cases. This allows you to send only important events required for your use cases.
- Ensure that you have only enabled datasets for profile that are required for your segmentation and personalization use cases.
- Configure Experience Event expirations and Pseudonymous Profile data expirations for high-frequency data like web data.
- Periodically check the Profile Composition Reports to understand your Profile store composition. This allows you to understand the data sources contributing most to your license usage consumption.
Feature summary and availability feature-summary
The best practices and tools outlined in this document will help you better manage your license entitlement usage within Adobe Experience Platform. This document will be updated as additional features are released to help provide visibility and control to all Experience Platform customers.
The following table outlines the list of currently available features at your disposal, to better manage your license usage entitlement.