Getting started

Hit attributes

The Discover Event Engine is based on its ability to recognize hit attributes in the session data. Hit Attributes, in the most generic sense, are the basis for recognizing data and marking it as an event in Discover. The data that is gathered by Hit Attributes are available only for the hit on which the event is triggered. For example, Hit Attributes for the third hit of the session, for example, URL, hit number, response time, are specific to the third hit of the session. Those Hit Attributes are different for the fourth hit of the session.

There are two types of Hit Attributes:

• System Hit attributes: Discover maintains a set of attribute values for each hit captured. These attributes are managed by the Canister and cannot be modified such as Network Trip Time. See EES reference - attribute reference.
• Custom Hit Attributes: The data object type Hit Attribute can be used to identify explicit strings in session data or the content between two specified tags.
  1. Text Pattern example: Logged Out. This text pattern example could be used as a condition for an event that identifies when the visitor explicitly logged out of your web application.
  2. Start Tag End Tag example: Suppose you wanted to identify the contents of the HTML table in the following code:

     
     <TD ID="ShoppingCartValue">$999.95</TD>
     
     

     • You could configure a hit attribute to use StartTag=<TD ID="ShoppingCartValue"> and EndTag=</TD> to gather the contents of the cell (in this case: $999.95). From these types of hit attributes, you can create a wide variety of events to monitor your web application.

Both types of Hit Attributes are displayed in the Hit Attribute tab of the Event Manager.

Session attributes

Session Attributes are values that are not specific to a hit. For example, Referrer for Session is a Session Attribute because it is the same throughout the session. Hit Referrer is a hit attribute because it changes per hit. Session Attributes need not to be constant throughout the session. The attribute Session Length changes on every hit. It is considered a Session Attribute and not a Hit Attribute because it is not specific to a hit. It is based on all hits up to that point in the session.

• System Session attributes: Similar to default hit attributes, default session attributes are commonly used properties that apply to the entire session such as Hit Count, Browser Type, or whether the session is from a Bot or not. See EES reference - attribute reference.
• Custom Session attributes: Custom session attributes are user-defined variables that are populated by events. While they can be used in an event, they are mostly useful for populating Session List Templates.

Both types of Session Attributes are displayed in the Session Attribute tab of the Event Manager.

Events

A Discover Event defines a set of criteria for which to search the captured session data. When matches are found, one or more actions can be taken, including the saving and delivering of the recorded value to one or more systems.

When data captured from sessions of visitors to your web application arrive to the Processing Server, the Discover Event Engine scans the data for the presence of these criteria. When these conditions are detected, the specified value is written.

Since Discover captures all requests and responses from visitor sessions, events provide a flexible facility for monitoring and analyzing individual hits and complete sessions.

The Discover event engine uses a customized version of JavaScript™ for event and event-related definitions. Events that you create are stored in JavaScript™.

• See EventEngineScripting.

Dimensions

Discover also enables the creation of reference dimensions, whose data is extracted from the session data when an event is triggered. When an event fires, the values of the associated dimensions are recorded with the event value. Suppose an event is triggered on a page with the following characteristics:

Dimension

Value

URL

/checkout.asp

Host

www.example.com

Application

shop

Server

255.255.255.255

The values for the URL, Host, Application, and Server for the page on which the event is triggered can be recorded in dimensions of the same name.

• The example set of dimensions is provided by Discover.

In reporting, you can then use dimensions as the context for filtering event data. Suppose that you were interested in the URLs where a Status Code 500 (Internal Server Error) message appeared. You could create the Status Code 500 event, which looks for the appropriate message in the response. If the URL dimension is associated with the event, you can quickly generate a list of all URLs where the error occurred.

Using events and dimensions, you can configure a wide-range of monitoring mechanisms, while capturing the contextual information necessary to make superior decisions.

Dimensions can be populated by Events, Hit Attributes, or Session Attributes.