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Administration
Administering HCL Discover involves configuring and integrating the HCL Discover client framework with your web applications or mobile native applications, installing and administering the databases used by HCL Discover, defining event objects and configuring events, hit attributes, dimensions, and other object attributes used by HCL Discover to monitor mission-critical metrics of your web application's performance.
HCL 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.
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.
System Dashboards
By default, Discover includes the following useful dashboards to provide a top-down perspective on system status and metrics:

Administration
Administering HCL Discover involves configuring and integrating the HCL Discover client framework with your web applications or mobile native applications, installing and administering the databases used by HCL Discover, defining event objects and configuring events, hit attributes, dimensions, and other object attributes used by HCL Discover to monitor mission-critical metrics of your web application's performance.
- HCL 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 HCL 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.
      - Active menu
        In the Portal, the Active menu provides access to a number of monitoring tools that can be used to assess how data is flowing through the system.
      - System Dashboards
        By default, Discover includes the following useful dashboards to provide a top-down perspective on system status and metrics:
      - Activity Reports
        Discover provides a set of activity reports that are accessible through the Discover Report Builder. These reports provide detailed metrics on the data that Discover has captured from your web application.
      - Performance Reports
        Performance reports provide insight into how your web application is performing with respect to content delivery to your visitors.
      - System Status Report
        In the System Status report, you can review the current system status for the following components of the Discover system for the selected server:
      - Checking Component Status through Manage Services
        Manage Services can be an effective tool for checking which components are currently running.
      - Tracking System Statistics
        In addition to the web application session data, Discover can capture hits containing statistics reported from multiple components of the system.
    - Reporting on Discover Servers
      Through the Portal, you can access a variety of reporting information on the various servers in the HCL 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 HCL 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 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 HCL Discover.
    - DNCA Administration Reporting
      Discover administrators who are also monitoring the HCL 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 HCL 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 HCL 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 HCL 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 HCL Discover and Unica Journey
    HCL 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 HCL Discover and Unica Interact
    HCL 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 HCL Discover system with the Selective Deletion tool.
  - Using the ArchiveConfig utility
    Run the ArchiveConfig utility to configure and execute Selective Archiving.
  - ELK Configurations
    Before configuring ELK on HCL Discover, there are some prerequisites:
  - Securing Interprocess Communication
    Discover 12.1.8 and above supports the use of a new SSL certificate based mechanism for securing all inter-process communication between the Discover servers. This is important in a distributed environment with multiple servers, as the components of Discover communicate with each other over the network, using a variety of ports.
- HCL Discover Data Export for Data Analysis Administration Manual
- Session Archiving Guide

System Dashboards

By default, Discover includes the following useful dashboards to provide a top-down perspective on system status and metrics:

About this task

These dashboards are available through the Dashboards menu in the Portal for HCL Discover users and in the menus listed below for HCL Discover users.

Procedure

Technical Site Metrics - This report provides useful information on system and user activities, as well as reports on individual pages.
Technical System Status - This dashboard summarizes technical status for current sessions, Discover canisters, the DecoupleEx session agent, storage usage, and database size.
- You can also access this dashboard by selecting Discover > System Status > Status Summary. See System Status Report.
- In the System Status menu, you can access reports on individual components of the Discover system. See System Status Report.

Results

For more information on dashboards, see "Using Dashboards" in the HCL Discover Manuals. HCL Discover administrators can configure dashboards to meet their needs. See "Configuring Dashboards" in the HCL Discover Manuals.

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