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Administration
Administering Unica Discover involves configuring and integrating the Unica Discover client framework with your web applications or mobile native applications, installing and administering the databases used by Unica Discover, defining event objects and configuring events, hit attributes, dimensions, and other object attributes used by Unica Discover to monitor mission-critical metrics of your web application's performance.
Unica Discover Administration Manual
Discover System Monitoring
Discover provides several mechanisms for monitoring the health of the Discover system and Discover user activities. This section provides access to the various tools available in the Discover system for monitoring it and its users.
Reporting on Captured Hits
A request and its matching response are bundled together as a hit in the Unica Discover Network Capture Application. After the DNCA captures a hit, it is forwarded to the Transport Service or the Health-Based Routing machine for disposition to the appropriate Short Term Canister.
Reporting on LTC
When a session is closed by user exit, session timeout setting, or Discover event, the session is moved from the STC to the Long Term Canister (LTC), which is a disk-based database of sessions.

Administration
Administering Unica Discover involves configuring and integrating the Unica Discover client framework with your web applications or mobile native applications, installing and administering the databases used by Unica Discover, defining event objects and configuring events, hit attributes, dimensions, and other object attributes used by Unica Discover to monitor mission-critical metrics of your web application's performance.
- Unica Discover Administration Manual
  - Discover Admin Overview
    This section is an overview to the Discover system and its components.
  - Discover System Monitoring
    Discover provides several mechanisms for monitoring the health of the Discover system and Discover user activities. This section provides access to the various tools available in the Discover system for monitoring it and its users.
    - Identifying Issues in Discover
      Through the Portal, you can troubleshoot a variety of issues that may be impacting the capture, evaluation, indexing, storage, and replay of session data.
    - User Activities
      The Discover Portal captures and reports on a variety of user activities, including logins, logouts, and usage of Portal features.
    - Portal Reporting for Discover Administrators
      Through the Portal, Discover administrators can access a wealth of information on the current and historical performance of the Unica Discover system as a whole, as well as individual components. Information includes a variety of useful reports, statistical information generated by the system itself, and logs for each Discover component.
    - External Monitoring Tools
      Several external, publicly available tools can be used to monitor Discover services and overall performance, as well as Discover database activities.
    - System Status
      Through the Portal, you can review System Status reports, which provide updated information on Discover server and component activities.
    - Discover System Status Dashboard
      The Discover System Status Dashboard provides visibility into the basic status of the canister, DecoupleEx session agent, and storage usage. Additionally, you can monitor the current status of events and page and session distributions.
    - General Usage of System Status Reports
      Detailed system status reports are available through the Discover Portal.
    - Configuring a System Status Report
      For any selected report, you can display data in summary form or from selected servers.
    - Reports
      System status reports provide an easy method for monitoring the status of the Discover system and its individual hardware and software components.
    - System Statistics
      The System Statistics reports expose a variety of metrics on the data that Discover is currently capturing.
    - Enabling System Statistics Hits
      Before you generate system statistics reports, you must enable the delivery of statistics hits from the relevant components through the Windows™ pipeline for analysis and reporting.
    - Generating a System Statistics Report
      Complete the following steps to generate a system statistics report.
    - Saving System Statistics Reports
      After you have configured a report, you can save the report configuration for later use.
    - Preconfigured Reports
      This section describes the pre-configured reports.
    - Canister Statistics
      By default, the Discover Canister monitors statistics and periodically submits statistics hits for capture and storage in the database. These statistics are available for display in this report in the Canister stats category.
    - Monitoring User Activity
      Through the Portal, you can keep tabs on user activities through a set of filtered reports. These reports provide insight into Discover users who have logged in or have not logged in for a period of time. Additional usage and session review reports are available.
    - Configuring User Activity Reports
      You can configure User Activity reports by completing the following steps.
    - Audit Reports
      The following reports are available.
    - Export
      You can export report data in either Excel or PDF format, and email the data.
    - Portal Application Information Report
      Through the Portal, you can review basic configuration information about the Portal application and execute a series of tests of various components of the Portal application.
    - Reporting for Discover Administrators
      This section provides an overview of resources available to Discover system administrators who wish to monitor overall system health and individual Discover components.
    - Monitoring Current System Status
      This section provides references to areas of the Discover Portal through which you can monitor the current status of various aspects of the Discover system.
    - Reporting on Discover Servers
      Through the Portal, you can access a variety of reporting information on the various servers in the Unica Discover environment.
    - Reporting on Discover Services
      The Portal Management page contains useful information on the individual services deployed by Discover on each server.
    - Reporting on Manage Services
      The Discover Management System provides centralized management of Discover configurations and can be used to configure and apply tasks to individual servers.
    - Reporting on the Portal Application
      In addition to log files, Discover provides the following useful features for reporting on the status of the Portal application itself.
    - Reporting on Captured Hits
      A request and its matching response are bundled together as a hit in the Unica Discover Network Capture Application. After the DNCA captures a hit, it is forwarded to the Transport Service or the Health-Based Routing machine for disposition to the appropriate Short Term Canister.
      - Hits in the DNCA
        Through the DNCA Web Console, you can monitor statistical information on the capture process and identify potential problems.
      - Hits in the Transport Service or HBR
        After a request has been matched with the corresponding response and passed through the DNCA's internal pipeline, the DNCA forwards the bundled hit to the Windows™ servers for processing.
      - In the Windows Pipeline
        This section describes how the Windows™ pipeline is monitored.
      - After Pipeline in STC
        After a hit has been successfully processed through the Windows™ pipeline, it is retained in the Short Term Canister, an in-memory database where hits from active sessions are accumulated until the session is closed.
      - Reporting on LTC
        When a session is closed by user exit, session timeout setting, or Discover event, the session is moved from the STC to the Long Term Canister (LTC), which is a disk-based database of sessions.
    - Reporting on Discover Databases
      Through the Portal, you can review a wide range of reports that are sourced from the Discover databases.
    - Reporting on Integration
      This section describes the integration of Unica Discover.
    - DNCA Administration Reporting
      Discover administrators who are also monitoring the Unica Discover Network Capture Application and its host can use the links below to access monitoring tools and methods for the DNCA.
    - Troubleshooting Discover Issues through the Portal
      The sections below describe how to identify the activities of the main processing pipeline through the Discover Portal:
    - Monitoring Active Status
      In the Portal, the Active menu contains useful tools for assessing the current activities in Discover. Review the menu items in the following order:
    - Troubleshooting Issues in the Pipeline
      The Windows-based pipeline is composed of a sequence of individual agents that perform manipulations on hits that have been captured by the Unica Discover Network Capture Application and forwarded to the Discover Transport Service.
    - Troubleshooting Issues in the Canister
      This section describes troubleshooting issues in the canister.
    - Troubleshooting Issues in Reporting
      After data has been stored in the Long Term Canister, the Discover Data Collector periodically scans the LTC for new sessions to aggregate and insert into the Discover databases, where the aggregated data is used to populate reports.
    - About Page in the Portal
      In the Portal, the About page provides significant information and a few tests of the Portal application.
  - Portal Management
    This section contains administration topics for managing the Discover Portal and features available through it.
  - Discover Management System
    The Discover Management System (Manage Services) centralizes configuration management for Discover systems on Windows™-based hosts.
  - Database Administration
    The Unica Discover datastore runs on top of a set of four Microsoft™ SQL Server databases.
  - Report Access Permissions
    Users whose accounts contain the proper permissions may administer Discover reports. Depending on the type of report, permissions to administer individual reports of that type are configured in the report definition.
  - Managing User Agents
    Through Discover, you can monitor the different types of user agents that contact your web application. Through a provided set of data objects, Discover can identify the type of traffic that is requesting resources from your web application and then monitor counts and other information that pertains to the type of user agent. These objects can be used as the source data for developing a useful set of user agent-related reports, enabling you to closely monitor the composition of traffic to your site.
  - Configuring User Agent Detection
    This section describes how to acquire and maintain the configuration files necessary for parsing of fixed and mobile user agents and how to prepare those files for use in the Unica Discover platform.
  - Configuring User Agent Events
    To use the data that is injected into the [ExtendedUserAgent] section by the Discover SessionAgentTLTRef, a Discover administrator must create events that create charts for this data.
  - User Agent Tools
    These external utilities can be used to monitor and update user agent configuration data that is required by Discover.
  - bot Detection
    Most commercial enterprise web applications are subjected to significant traffic from web crawling bots. Short for "robot," a bot is a software agent that navigates websites to extract information about them. Some bots are used by search engines for indexing pages.
  - Discover Reference Information
    Use the links below to access reference information on file formats, common standards, and more in use by the Discover system.
  - Integrating Unica Discover and Unica Journey
    Unica Discover and Unica Journey integration works with CEP configuration. The CEP configuration enables the event to be sent to CEP and the external systems. Unica Discover-Unica Journey integration is supported from version 12.1.0.3 onwards.
  - Integrating Unica Discover and Unica Interact
    Unica Discover and Unica Interact integration works with CEP configuration. The CEP configuration enables the event to be sent to CEP and the external systems. Unica Discover-Unica Interact integration is supported from version 12.1.0.3 onwards.
  - Selective Deletion
    You can delete sessions and session fragments from the Unica Discover system with the Selective Deletion tool.
  - ELK Configurations
    Before configuring ELK on Unica Discover, there are some prerequisites:
- Unica Discover Data Export for Data Analysis Administration Manual
- Session Archiving Guide

Reporting on LTC

When a session is closed by user exit, session timeout setting, or Discover event, the session is moved from the STC to the Long Term Canister (LTC), which is a disk-based database of sessions.

Sessions in the LTC are marked for indexing, which is executed as a separate process at predefined intervals. Indexing can be monitored through the Canister Status report in the System Status page. See System Status.
For more information on indexing, see "Configuring Indexing" in the Discover Configuration Manual.
For more information on how to troubleshoot issues in indexing, see Troubleshooting Discover Issues through the Portal.

Sessions are stored in the Long Term Canister for a predefined number of days. Depending on data volumes of your site, you may need to monitor the current day's storage volume and anticipated storage requirements for the time period in which sessions are stored in the LTC.

You can monitor LTC storage volumes through the Storage report in the System Status page. See System Status.
For more information on troubleshooting issues in the LTC, see Troubleshooting Discover Issues through the Portal.

Sessions in the LTC can be searched through the Portal. Reporting on search effectiveness is available for user groups. See Reporting on users and groups.

Unica Discover users can review dashboard charts on search effectiveness. See "Overview Dashboard" in the Discover Manuals.

For more information on searching through the Portal, see "Searching Session Data" in the Discover Manuals.

Unica Discover users can search by visitor for session data and other visitor-based information. See "Searching for Visitors" in the Unica Discover Manuals.

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