Summary
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- What is a task?
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What happens if I reach my task limit while jobs are running?
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What happens if I accidentally ran a job with more results than I initially wanted?
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Why is there a big difference between the results I got and the tasks my job consumed?
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What happens to my unused tasks? Can they be added to my next cycle?
What is a task?
A task is a simple action you would do manually.
Technically, it equals to one request on our end. When we are not able to perform the request, the task won't be counted. If the request doesn't retrieve any result, we will still count the task because we deployed resources to check this result.
How are tasks calculated?
One task is one action.
Example with a search and an extraction on LinkedIn:
Manually, you would connect to LinkedIn, search for a profile (e.g. Guillaume Odier), click on it and copy paste every data you can find on the profile.
With Captain Data, this would be two tasks: one to search the profile on LinkedIn and one to extract all of its data. Simple as that.
Why are we working with a tasks system?
The thing is, with time credits we cannot really anticipate what your usage will be.
It's better to think about it in terms of actions: one line of data equals to one action automated which equals to one task.
What happens if I reach my tasks limit during the month?
When you've consumed all of your tasks for the month, all the jobs you will run will be shutdown. You will need to wait until the next month to continue your work.
One solution our clients use is to buy tasks with our tasks add-on if they have a temporary need.
What happens if I reach my task limit while jobs are running?
If you launched a job that exceeds the number of remaining tasks, the job will run till it reaches your tasks limit, which could happen in the middle of the job. All the remaining steps will be in shutdown.
You'll be able to retry these steps when your tasks are renewed.
Do I get notified when I reach my task limit?
If you reach your task limit when a job is running, you will get an error message on your job saying that you've reached your number of tasks for the month.
What happens to my tasks if a job didn't work properly?
If you had an issue on your job, we will count the tasks on the steps that succeeded. The other steps will be in warning or shutdown which will eventually stop the job to continue working. For that, we won't count tasks because we were no able to make the requests.
What happens if I accidentally ran a job with more results than I initially wanted?
When running a job, be careful to check in the “Configure Parameters” section that the maximum results align with what you want.
If you unintentionally ran a job with too many results which consumed more tasks than expected, next time you could refer to our tasks calculator in the launcher. It allows you to check the maximum of tasks that could be consumed by the job, it could be less.
Why is there a big difference between the results I got and the tasks my job consumed?
Sometimes you can see that the total number of tasks is way higher than the results that you get.
To learn more, you can click on your job to check the job details which shows the tasks distribution on each step of the job.
Example here: I see that this job consumed 600 tasks for only 200 results.
If I click on it, I can see the tasks distribution for each step:
If I add up the results of the 3 first steps, It gives me 600 which is the number of consumed tasks.
The last step doesn't count because it's a generic task on our end :).
What happens to my unused tasks? Can they be added to my next cycle?
All the tasks that were not consumed during your billing cycle won't be added to the next one.
There is always something to do on Captain Data, you can check our Templates section to browse more templates.
You can also ask your Account Executive to adjust your workflows or advise you on other use cases for your business.