Building a resilient solution

Many solutions depend heavily on functionality like search-based landing pages. This topic suggests ways to keep your site working, should the Episerver Search & Navigation (formerly Episerver Find) service become unavailable.

Service reliability

You should count on the reliability specified in your service level agreement (SLA). Nevertheless, as search is a central part of a solution, you should implement a graceful degradation strategy if the Search & Navigation service should become unavailable.

Note: If Episerver is not hosting Search & Navigation, Episerver cannot guarantee the connection between an application and the Search & Navigation service.

Recommendations for coping with downtime

Leave the search-generated page sections blank

For example, a page displays a list of most watched products, which is fetched from Search & Navigation. If Search & Navigation is down, display a blank list.

Advantage

• Simple to implement.

Disadvantage

• Site does not display expected information.

Implement query caching

Advantages

• Relatively simple to implement.
• Site still works in many scenarios even if Search & Navigation is down.

Disadvantage

• Development effort required.

Use FindPagesWithCriteria as back-up

Advantage

• Site works even if Search & Navigation has issues.

Disadvantages

• Takes longer to implement.
• Site significantly slower.

Last updated: May 08, 2019