Configuring Unica Discover involves setting up and managing Discover user authorization and configuring Discover server components and services that process captured data.
Discover events provide the mechanisms for monitoring mission-critical metrics and other indicators of your web application's performance, including software errors, failures to complete transactions, customer struggles, and more. Through Discover events, IT staff, business managers, and executives can keep tabs on critical aspects of the overall customer experience.
Discover Report Builder uses a dimensional data model that is populated by event-based mechanisms to deliver a reporting facility of unprecedented power and flexibility to manage the customer experience of your web application. Events and event-related mechanisms are developed and tested through the Discover Event Manager, which is integrated into the Discover Portal.
A dimension is a list of values that are associated with an event. When an event is triggered, the detected value is reported into a dimension.
Unica Discover Event Manager provides the user interface for defining the event objects used to monitor your visitors' sessions. Here you can configure the events, hit attributes, dimensions, session attributes, alerts, and deviations to monitor customer success and struggle with your web application.
Discover Eventing works for both full DOM and Network capture. However, the resulting metrics and reporting data that is generated from an Event definition can be effected by the capture type (full DOM versus Network) used.
Before you begin building events, you must spend some time to consider how events can be used to model the business processes reflected in your web application. There are several up-front considerations in how to build events to manage important categories of information about your web application.
When triggered, an event is a situation or condition that is identified in data that is captured by Discover that causes an action. An event definition specifies the hit attribute or other data that must appear in the request, response, or session as a whole.
An alert is an action triggered off the triggering of an event or off a threshold value for an event. For example, if the number of application errors is tracked in an event, you can configure an alert to trigger off the occurrence of this event (meaning at least one application error occurred) or off the occurrence of 10 application errors, which can require escalation of the issue. Alerts are defined through the Discover Event Manager in the Discover Portal.
An event can be associated with one or more report groups. A report group is a set of dimensions that can be displayed on the same report. A report group can be thought of as the parent of dimensions.
A fact is a data structure that is generated when an event fires. It contains the triggering event, its value, and the related dimension or dimensions and values. The fact is the essential data storage structure for Discover reporting. This internal storage mechanism is not directly accessible to Discover users through the Portal.
The Discover Report Builder enables flexible report configuration and delivery in various output formats. Through the Report Builder, you can select events and drag their dimensional data into your report, applying segment filtration as needed.
Through the Events tab in the Discover Event Manager, you can define, edit, test, and organize events to monitor specific conditions in your visitors' sessions. Discover events provide a flexible and powerful mechanism for tracking at the most granular level what is happening during a visitor's session.
When processing hit data, the Discover event engine searches each hit for patterns of text. These patterns can signify an event of interest, such as the occurrence of the word Sorry in the response, or can bracket a text string of interest, such as the value of a form field. These patterns can be explicitly specified or can be defined using the start and end tags for which an event should look when evaluating a condition or setting a value.
Sorry
Through the Discover Event Manager, you can specify data dimensions to track metadata associated with an event. They can be considered the contextual data captured at the moment of event execution.
A session attribute is a pre-defined variable that is persistent throughout the life of a Discover session. Session attributes may be used to store various data that may be referenced by events at any point during the session.
Through the Discover Event Manager, you can define alerts that are triggered based on Discover events or Top Movers. When threshold values are detected in the related event or Top Mover, an alert is generated and delivered in the appropriate format to the designated recipients.
Through the Discover Event Manager, you can indicate the events, dimensions, and ratios whose variations you wish to track over time. Through the Top Movers tab, you can track the metrics that are major movers on your site.
Through the Import and Export tabs, you can export a set of selected event definitions and all supporting data objects from your current system and import a set that has been exported. Import/export controls enable the easy migration of event definitions from a development environment to testing and staging environments.
Integrated into the Discover Event Manager, the Event Tester enables you to test active events and hit attributes, even if they are saved in draft mode, against sessions that you upload to the server. This integrated tool provides a quick method for validating the event objects you define before you deploy them into the live transaction stream.
In Advanced Mode, you can review and modify the actual JavaScript™ function that is called to process the event.
The section provides an overview of how events are initially installed and stored in the database and later updated based on changes in the Discover Event Manager.
There are two basic types of dimensions: