Building block events

A building block event is an event that exists only in the Canister for purposes of creating or populated other event-related objects. It is not stored to disk and is therefore not available at any time through the Portal.

A building block event is configured to be active and disabled for all other Portal-related configuration settings. The event is never used outside of the in-memory evaluation of the session. Unless the detected data is saved to a different event or a session attribute, it is not retained beyond the time when the session is closed.

For example, suppose that you were interested in the elapsed time of the hit across the network. Since this value is detected at the individual hit level, saving values for each hit may be expensive, and you may be interested only in exceptional values for the network time. So, the best practice is to create a building block event to capture high-volume events and then to create an event or attribute to detect the exceptions.

  • The building block event to detect network time is provided by Discover: Hit Network Trip Time (ms) [BB].

In the Event Manager, Discover Standard Events that are building blocks are identified by the [BB] tag at the end of their names.

  • To see the list of building block events, enter [BB] in the Event filter textbox on the Events tab.
  • The [BB] suffix is a naming convention that was applied to the Discover Standard Events. It is not automatically added to events that are not searchable and reportable by definition.