Decision Management services

Learn about decision data nodes and the types of decision management services.

Decision data nodes

The decision data nodes infrastructure is an underlying element of the Decision Management architecture. Decision Management operates based on the allocation of Pega Platform nodes to different Decision Management services.

Decision data nodes are a repository for analytical data from a variety of sources that also provide the infrastructure for decisioning services. Decision data nodes are clustered and capable of storing large volumes of data at high speed. A decision data node consists of a Pega Platform system augmented by an embedded Cassandra database process.

Any node that is part of a Pega Platform outer cluster can be a decision data node. The cluster infrastructure detects if there are Pega nodes configured to operate as decision data nodes. You cannot add decision data nodes to a service if the nodes are already part of the cluster, or if no nodes are configured to be decision data nodes.

A cluster of decision data nodes leverages the Cassandra functionality to protect data from failure and to provide horizontal scalability.

In Pega Platform, a decision data node is used to make specialized decisions in real time. You can gather data from different sources on a decision data node, and then make that data available for real-time processing, as well as optimize it for batch processing.

Data is distributed evenly across decision data nodes in the cluster. For this reason, you can expect approximately the same increase in disk space usage at the same rate.

Types of decision management services

The Services landing page lists the nodes that can participate in the following Decision Management functional areas:
Decision Data Store
The Decision Data Store (DDS) service stores data that is used in decision management, such as customer data, in a Cassandra database.
Adaptive Decision Manager
The Adaptive Decision Manager (ADM) service predicts customer behavior in real time by creating predictive models and updating them as new customer responses come in. The ADM service can also establish customer preferences without previously collected historical data.
Data Flow
The Data Flow service enables running data flow instances on decision data nodes. Data flows are rules for sequencing and combining data (based on various sources) and writing the results to a destination.
Real Time Data Grid
The Real Time Data Grid (RTDG) service performs historical analysis and forecasting to assess the success of your business strategy by using key performance indicators (KPIs).
Stream
The Stream service enables asynchronous flow of data between processes in Pega Platform.