Interesting Agent

The Interesting agent tracks election results for every candidate who has at least one interest option flag enabled in Flow. As election results show something interesting happening for one of these tracked candidates, the Interesting agent creates an Interesting Event for that event status. As you review election results, you can instantly identify areas of interest and filter to feature interesting data only. Each candidate in Flow can have a number of candidate interest options flagged, such as Minister, Underdog, Political Veteran, or you can work with Bannister Lake Support to customize the candidate interest options for your needs.

The Interesting agent retrieves updated data every 10 seconds.

Interesting Events

There are a number of interesting events that are automatically generated as results come in (If the Interesting Agent is running)

• Tied lead candidates (are looked for regardless of the Required Poll Percent setting)

• Results Predication based events (requires predictions to be entered for the ridings)

  • candidate is behind when they were predicted to be the leader

  • candidate has a smaller lead than expected

  • candidate is doing better than expected with a greater percentage of the votes then predicted

• Leading party has changed

• Bad elected candidate: a candidate who was elected but is now trailing.

• Incumbent is losing

• Interesting candidate is

  • Elected

  • Leading/trailing by < 1%

  • Leading/trailing by < 5%

  • Leading/trailing by > 5%

  • Leading/trailing by > 10%

  • Leading/trailing by > 20%

Configuration Options

There are a number of System Preference settings that control when the interesting events are generated.

Interesting Events - Required Poll Percent

The percentage of polls that must be reporting in the riding before any non-prediction events are created. (This excludes Tied lead candidate events)
Default: 5

Prediction: Required Poll Percent

The percentage of polls that must be reporting in the riding before any prediction events are created.
Default: 5

Prediction: Electable Lead-Poll Percent Steps

Defines the lead% and poll% values that identify when a riding is considered electable. Leave blank to disable. Use the format pattern: Lead% @Poll%, Lead% @Poll%

Prediction: Interesting Events Enabled

When enabled the Interesting Agent will generate events related to predictions.
Default: true

Prediction: Landslide Winner Allowed Difference

Sets the value that controls how much margin you have to have on the second highest potential to be considered a landslide/guaranteed/certain winner in the riding.
Default: 25

Prediction: Party Exceeding Percent

Sets the value that controls how large a difference is required to be considered exceeding expectations.
Default: 10

Prediction: Party Slim Lead Percent

Sets the value that controls how small a lead is required to be considered slim.
Default: 5

Prediction: Potential Winner Allowed Difference

Sets the value that controls how close you have to be to the highest potential to be considered an expected winner.
Default: 10

Running a Cloud Instance? 

Customers using a cloud instance of Elector with Flow do not need to manage the Interesting agent themselves; Bannister Lake manages it for you. For assistance with your instance of the Interesting agent, contact Bannister Lake Support. 

Running a Local Instance?

Customers using a local instance of Elector can access and manage their own instance of the Interesting agent.

• In a standard installation, the Interesting agent is available on the server, also known as the Elector data server.

• In a custom installation, the Interesting agent may be located elsewhere. See your local system administrator for details.

Access Interesting Agent

Open

To access the Interesting agent, run the agent from its desktop icon on the server.
When the agent opens, you can manage the database connection to the Elector database.

Manage Database Connection 

The Interesting agent must be configured to connect to your database. Connection and user authentication values would have been correctly configured by your system administrator initially during installation. Use caution when modifying these values. Contact Bannister Lake Support for assistance.

Select Setup to configure and manage the Interesting agent database connection. Click Update/Test to test the connection.

Open

From this dialog you can also review the latest data retrieval status using the Interesting Agent tab.

Replication Monitoring

If you have setup a backup server that is replicating the primary server then you can enable the IA app to report on the status of the backup server replication process. It will create an entry in the Agent Status widget visible in Flow for easy access by users so you don't have to be on the server to check in on it. 

Configuration

To enable this you need to configure the Replication User preferences in Flow.

Enable It

To start monitoring after the preferences in Flow have been set to enable it to connect - you click the checkbox to enable the monitoring in the IA app. 

If it is able to successfully connect - it will display the current status of the slave in the IA UI.

If it is not able to connect - a hopefully somewhat useful error message will display instead.