[Limited availability]{class="badge informative"}
Pause a journey journey-pause
You can pause your live journeys, perform all changes needed, and resume them again at any time. During the pause, you can apply global filters to exclude profiles based on their attributes. The journey is automatically resumed at the end of the pause period. You can also resume it manually.
Key benefits journey-pause-benefits
Pause and resume journeys give journey practitioners greater control and flexibility by allowing live journeys to be temporarily suspended without disrupting customer experience. When paused, no communications are sent, and profiles remain in a suspended state until the journey is resumed.
This capability reduces the risk of sending unintended messages during errors or updates (eg: change on message content), supports safer journey management, and increases practitioner confidence. Visibility into paused journeys and their status directly in the UI further enhances transparency and operational agility.
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Permissions to pause and resume journeys are restricted to users with the Publish journeys high-level permission. Learn more about managing Journey Optimizer users’ access rights in this section.
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Before starting using the pause/resume capability, read out the Guardrails and limitations.
How to pause a journey journey-pause-steps
You can pause any Live journey.
To pause your journey, follow these steps:
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Open the journey you want to pause.
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Click the …M´Ç°ù±ð button on the upper-right section of the journey canvas, and select Pause.
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Select how to manage profiles which are currently in the journey.
You can:
- Hold profiles - Profiles will wait on the next Action node for the journey to be resumed
- Discard profiles - Profiles will be excluded from the journey on the next Action node
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Click the Pause button to confirm.
From the list of your journeys, you can pause one or several Live journeys. To pause a group of journeys (bulk pause), select them in the list and click the Pause button in the blue bar at the bottom of the screen. The Pause button is only available when Live journeys are selected.
Behavior in paused journeys
When a journey is paused, fresh entrances are always discarded, irrespective of Hold / Discard mode.
When a journey is paused, profile management and activity execution depends on the activity. Behaviors are detailed below. For a complete understanding, see also this End to end sample.
- At the first node in the canvas: Any profile qualification to the audience is discarded
- In other nodes: Same behavior as in a live journey, however if the audience qualification is after an Action activity and the user is paused on that action, the audience qualification is discarded.
- At the first node in the canvas: The event is discarded
- In other nodes: Same behavior as in a live journey, however if the event is after an Action activity and the user is paused on that action, the event is discarded.
Same behavior as in a live journey, with a few specificities:
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If Pause was pressed after the Read audience activity had started, profiles which have entered the journey will continue (until the next Action activity). As journey reads audiences at a certain speed, if the complete audience has not entered yet, remaining profiles in the queue will be discarded.
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For single executions: No error will be shown at resume time if the scheduled date was before the resume date. That schedule would be ignored.
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For incremental journeys:
- If pause happens before the first occurence then on resume the complete audience would be played.
- If pause happens, for instance, on the 4th day of a daily recurrence and journey remains paused until the 9th day then on resume all the profiles that have entered from 4th-9th would be included
How to resume a paused journey journey-resume-steps
Paused journeys are automatically resumed at the end of the maximum pause period of 14 days. They can be resumed manually at any time. Resume a paused journey allows new profiles to enter again. If profiles were waiting during the pause, they will continue their journey. Ideal for safely restarting journeys after updates or pauses.
To resume a paused journey, and start listening to journey events again, follow these steps:
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Open the journey you want to resume.
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Select the …M´Ç°ù±ð button on the upper-right section of the journey canvas, and then Resume.
The journey switches to the Resuming status. When the journey resumes, fresh entrances start within a minute. Resuming profiles that were held can take some time - profiles are resumed at a 5k tps rate. As all profiles have to be resumed for the journey to be Live again, the transition from the Resuming to Live status can take some time.
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Click the Resume button to confirm.
From the list of your journeys, you can resume one or several Paused journeys. To resume a group of journeys (bulk resume), select them and click the Resume button located in the blue bar at the bottom of the screen. Please note that the Resume button will only be available when Paused journeys are selected.
Apply a global filter to profiles in a paused journey journey-global-filters
When a journey is paused, you can apply a global filter based on profile attributes. This filter enables the exclusion of profiles that match the defined expression at resume time. Once the global filter is set, it will be enforced on action nodes, even for new profiles entrance. Existing profiles matching the criteria and new profiles entering the journey will be excluded from the journey on the next action node they encounter.
For example, to exclude all French customers from a paused journey, follow these steps:
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Browse to the paused journey you want to modify.
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Select the Exit criteria & Global filter icon.
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In the Exit Criteria & Global Filter settings, click Add Global Filter to define a filter based on profile attributes.
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Set the expression to exclude profiles where the country attribute equals France.
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Save your filter and click the Update journey button to apply your changes.
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At resume time, all profiles with the country attribute set to France will automatically be excluded from the journey at the next action node. Any new profiles with the country attribute set to France trying to enter the journey is also blocked at the next action node.
Be aware that profile exclusions for profiles currently in the journey and for new profiles will only occur when they reach an action node.
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You can only set one global filter per journey.
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You can only create, update or delete a global filter in Paused journeys.
Guardrails and limitations journey-pause-guardrails
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A journey version can be paused for up to 14 days, with a maximum of 10 million profiles allowed in paused journeys across your organization.
This limit is checked every 30 minutes. This means you might temporarily exceed the 10 million threshold, but once the system detects it, any additional profiles will be automatically discarded.If you resume journeys to bring the number of held profiles back under the limit, the journey resumes immediately — but it can take up to 30 minutes for the profile count to update. During that time, the system may still consider those profiles as paused.
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Paused journeys are counted towards live journey quota
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Profiles that had entered journey but were discarded during the pause would still be counted as engageable profiles
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Paused journeys are considered in all business rules, in the same way as if they were live
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Journey global timeout still applies for paused journeys. For instance, if a profile was in a journey for 90 days and the journey is paused, this profile will still exit the journey on the 91th day
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Profiles are discarded in a paused journey when they reach an action activity. If they stay on a wait during the time a journey is paused and exit that wait after it has resumed, they will continue the journey and not be discarded. See the end-to-end sample
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Even after the pause, as events continue to be processed, these events would be counted towards the number of Journey Events per second quota after which throttling comes to picture for unitary
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When profiles hold in a paused journey, at resume time, profile attributes are refreshed
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Conditions are still executed in paused journeys so if a journey has been paused because of data quality issues, any condition prior to an action node can be evaluated with wrong data
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For incremental audience based Read audience journeys, paused duration is taken into consideration. This is not the case for audience qualification or event-based journeys (if an audience qualification or an event are received during a pause, and they are the first activity in the journey, those events are discarded)
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If profiles are held in a journey and this journey automatically resumes after a few days, profiles continue the journey and are not dropped. If you want to drop them, you must stop the journey
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In paused journeys, alerts do not fire for batch segment alerting
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There are no audit logs in the system when after 14 days pause state of the journey is terminated
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Some discarded profiles can be visible in the Journey Step Event but not visible in the reporting. For example:
- Discard business events for Read Audience
- Read Audience jobs getting dropped due to paused journey
- Discarded events when the Event activity was after an action one where the profile was waiting
End-to-end sample journey-pause-sample
Let’s take the example of the journey below:
When pausing this journey, you select if profiles are Discarded or Hold, and then profile management is the following:
- AddToCart activity: all new profiles entrances are blocked. If a profile has already entered the journey before a pause, they continue up to the next action node.
- Wait activity: profiles continue to wait normally on the node and will exit it, even if the journey is in pause.
- Condition: profiles continue to go through conditions and move to the right branch, based on the expression defined on the condition.
- Push/Email activities: during a paused journey, profiles start waiting or get discarded (based on the choice made by the user at the time of pause) on the next action node. So profiles will start waiting or get discarded there.
- Events after Action nodes: if a profile is waiting on an Action node and there is an Event activity after it, if that event is fired, the profile is discarded.
As per this behavior, you can see profile numbers increasing on paused journey, mostly in activities before Action activities. For instance, in that example, the Wait activity is still enabled, increasing the number of profiles going through the Condition activity, as they exit it.
When you resume this journey:
- Fresh journey entrances start within a minute.
- Profiles that were currently waiting in the journey on Action activities get resumed at a 5k tps rate. They can then enter the Action they were waiting for, and continue the journey.