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.
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.
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.
This section describes how the Windows™ pipeline is monitored.
This section is an overview to the Discover system and its components.
Through the Portal, you can troubleshoot a variety of issues that may be impacting the capture, evaluation, indexing, storage, and replay of session data.
The Discover Portal captures and reports on a variety of user activities, including logins, logouts, and usage of Portal features.
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.
Several external, publicly available tools can be used to monitor Discover services and overall performance, as well as Discover database activities.
Through the Portal, you can review System Status reports, which provide updated information on Discover server and component activities.
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.
Detailed system status reports are available through the Discover Portal.
For any selected report, you can display data in summary form or from selected servers.
System status reports provide an easy method for monitoring the status of the Discover system and its individual hardware and software components.
The System Statistics reports expose a variety of metrics on the data that Discover is currently capturing.
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.
Complete the following steps to generate a system statistics report.
After you have configured a report, you can save the report configuration for later use.
This section describes the pre-configured reports.
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.
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.
You can configure User Activity reports by completing the following steps.
The following reports are available.
You can export report data in either Excel or PDF format, and email the data.
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.
This section provides an overview of resources available to Discover system administrators who wish to monitor overall system health and individual Discover components.
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.
Through the Portal, you can access a variety of reporting information on the various servers in the Unica Discover environment.
The Portal Management page contains useful information on the individual services deployed by Discover on each server.
The Discover Management System provides centralized management of Discover configurations and can be used to configure and apply tasks to individual servers.
In addition to log files, Discover provides the following useful features for reporting on the status of the Portal application itself.
Through the DNCA Web Console, you can monitor statistical information on the capture process and identify potential problems.
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.
At the top of the Windows™ pipeline, the Extended Decoupler session agent manages the rate at which hits are fed into the pipeline.
You can monitor the activities of the Windows™ pipeline and the aggregated hit statistics of content being passed through individual session agents through Manage Services.
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.
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.
Through the Portal, you can review a wide range of reports that are sourced from the Discover databases.
This section describes the integration of Unica Discover.
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.
The sections below describe how to identify the activities of the main processing pipeline through the Discover Portal:
In the Portal, the Active menu contains useful tools for assessing the current activities in Discover. Review the menu items in the following order:
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.
This section describes troubleshooting issues in the canister.
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.
If you have installed Unica Discover, you can use the following sections to troubleshoot issues with the Visitors database.
In the Portal, the About page provides significant information and a few tests of the Portal application.
This section contains administration topics for managing the Discover Portal and features available through it.
The Discover Management System (Manage Services) centralizes configuration management for Discover systems on Windows™-based hosts.
The Unica Discover datastore runs on top of a set of four Microsoft™ SQL Server databases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[ExtendedUserAgent]
These external utilities can be used to monitor and update user agent configuration data that is required by Discover.
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.
Use the links below to access reference information on file formats, common standards, and more in use by the Discover system.
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.
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.
You can delete sessions and session fragments from the Unica Discover system with the Selective Deletion tool.