Is your back-office ready for the biggest test of the year?

As we approach Thanksgiving, we’re rapidly coming up on the holiday season. For many retailers, wholesalers, and the industries that cater to them, this is the busiest season of them all!

For users and soon-to-be NetSuite users who are considering an integration to automate parts of the order-to-cash process, we figured now would be a great time to talk about NetSuite concurrency-governance!

What is NetSuite Governance?

To quickly sum up, NetSuite has set up rules (Governance) for its users so that each user can only take up so much of the servers total computing power at one time. Bad-actors and careless developers could crash the servers if NetSuite did not have these rules in place.

NetSuite limits suitescripts by requiring “governance-units” for specific actions, like API calls, and also limits the number of simultaneous connections to the server by a specific account or user.

Today, our focus will be on the simultaneous connections allowed to your account by NetSuite, known as concurrency governance.

NetSuite Concurrency-Governance

With NetSuite, the number of connections you can have with the server at the same time is limited by your Service Tier and the number of SuiteCloud Plus Licenses you purchase from NetSuite.

The number of connections is limited on the account-level and user-level. There is no way around the hard account-level limit.

How Could This Affect My Integration Plans?

When developing integrations with the NetSuite platform, concurrency will be something you always have to account for. If you do not properly consider the limitations, a sudden spike in connections, from something like the holiday rush, could bottle up all the bandwidth and cause some of the integrations to fail.

How Do I Make Sure This Doesn’t Happen?

It will take planning.

First, you’ll need to consider the number of connections you have and the number of connections you’ll need. Use the chart above along with the service tier and the number of SuiteCloud Plus licenses you have or plan to have.

Next, determine which integration flows need to have real-time access vs those that can be sent over in batches.

Real-time integration flows will be the toughest to plan for as they usually are triggered by an event out of the system admins control, such as a customer order coming in from the website. It’s important to note that each individual order would need its own connection to be successfully submitted to NetSuite. If too many orders happen to stack up at the same time, this would mean some of the orders won’t make it over.

The best way to plan for real-time integrations is with historical data. Sticking with our webstore example, looking at the number of webstore orders from this time last year will give you an idea of how many orders that you received during different times of the year.  This can be used to help calculate how many orders you should plan for and how many Suitecloud licenses you’ll need to make it through this season.

Batch integrations are easy to plan for as they can be scheduled at a time when few other connections are required. Each batch only needs one connection regardless of how many records are in the batch. This way, you can easily keep yourself under the account-level limit with just the use of a calendar.

Since batch integrations require less SuiteCloud Plus licenses, this means that they will be much less expensive to manage than real-time integrations. Because of this, only integration flows that 100% need to be in real-time should be set up as such, and you’ll find that there are not many situations where the data needs to be sent over in real-time. Most of the time, it makes more sense to save money and have your data come in “near-time.”

With that said, not all systems are set up to store data for you and hold it until it can be sent to NetSuite. When those situations occur, you have two options: pay up for the SuiteCloud Plus licenses or consider developing a queue.

Considering a Queue

If paying up for the SuiteCloud Plus licenses would render the integration prohibitively expensive, you do have one more option. Going back to the webstore analogy, if you had a queue in place, the orders would be sent from your webstore to a database where they can wait for the scheduled time to be pulled into NetSuite in batches that NetSuite can handle without risking any failing.

You can think of a queue kind like the roped off lines at the bank. They are there to keep people in the correct order they arrived and make sure the tellers are only helping as many people as they can handle at one time.

The queue would need to be built custom for your business, but this is a common way to handle NetSuite’s concurrency dilemma and usually is much less expensive than piling on the SuiteCloud Plus licenses.

If you have any questions about queues, real-time integrations, or have your own ways of managing NetSuite’s Concurrency Governance, share them with the NetSuite community in the form of a comment down below!