Business iQ - Troubleshooting and using Browser Analytics Webinar [Air-Date January 17, 2018]
@Gaurav.Soni leads this webinar.
Calling all users and owners of AppD Analytics licenses. We are starting a Business iQ Ask the Expert Webinar Series just for you. This webinar is intended to provide the required knowledge, instruction and guidance to help you become more successful in bridging the gap between the app and the business. The goal for this webinar series is to help as you are planning, installing, configuring and customizing dashboards. We will also cover best practices to improve your day-to-day activities with AppD Analytics and discuss how to get started utilizing specific features.
*If you have trouble viewing the recording - please try to stream from Webex.
Webinar Q&A Trancript
Table of Contents:
How can I analyze the worst performing pages by average end-user response time while excluding pages...
How do we access Business Outcomes and is this a new feature of 4.4?
How is a metric created after a minute?
Can an ADQL metric query or business metric refer to another defined ADQL-based metric or can it onl...
How does the data age over time and for how long can I see browser analytics data?
How is the data set powered and are there limits on the data set?
Q: How can I analyze the worst performing pages by average end-user response time while excluding pages that have very low traffic?
A: There are two streams by which you can visualize the End-User Monitoring (EUM) or the browser-related data. One stream is available through the controller via Metrics, where you can go to Pages in the Ajax and see individual page registration and average response time.
The second stream, which is more pertinent for this scenario, is the analytics stream that is explained on the “In Action” slide of the presentation (Slide 3 at 02:35). The Events Service piece, which is the platform that supports the analytics data set, contains raw data. You can write a query that looks at average response times for a given window of time and tell it to exclude pages with fewer than X page counts. You can write advanced queries that are only limited by what ADQL offers you.
Q: How do we access Business Outcomes and is this a new feature of 4.4?
A: Yes, this feature was introduced in 4.4. If your controller is hosted on SaaS, Business Outcomes is enabled by default as part of your analytics entitlement. If you are on-premise, Business Outcomes is disabled by default but can be enabled from your Events Service.
Q: How is a metric created after a minute?
A: Metric calculations work the same whether they are APM-triggered or EUM-triggered. For the purposes of browser data, you can visualize the EUM collector as one giant agent. It will look at calculations of average response time for beacons, which are user-triggered data captures that happen for a given controller minute. It compiles and aggregates the data for a given controller minute and performs various metric calculations (including average), after which the controller fetches the data.
That is one of the limitations in the Metric Browser. It is helpful for trending and quick troubleshooting scenarios but is less helpful when trying to narrow in on particular user’s experience. This is where the Business iQ or Browser Analytics piece is beneficial because the entire data set is made available to run queries. As a best practice, use a combination of both when investigating and looking at browser data. People tend to use the Metric Browser and the core Controller Visualization as the starting point for standardized queries with respect to performance, then dive into the ADQL or dashboard-based approach on the Business iQ side to complete the picture.
Q: Can an ADQL metric query or business metric refer to another defined ADQL-based metric or can it only be defined on the underlying event data?
A: You cannot nest analytics metrics at this time. For the vast majority, the current Metric Browser gives you adequate capability. If you are having to create nested metrics, consider if you can visualize it via the Dashboard. The reason behind this is that you could run a query for a metric over the last 24 hours but if you introduce any sub-selections, it becomes a fairly expensive operation on the back-end and can slow down the whole metric calculation model.
Q: How does the data age over time and for how long can I see browser analytics data?
A: The data is time-limited to eight days. Historically, Web Analyze was a light-weight functionality for analytics data sets. One of the reasons we made this is because we wanted users to ask questions about their data. Many customers could set metrics and relevant alerting, but those who were new to EUM and browser monitoring didn’t know what questions to ask. One of the ways we could help was by making data sets available (Web Analyze), which is the exact raw data capture that EUM creates and pushes into the Events Service. By default, you can see the last week’s worth of data, though some of the advanced querying techniques are only available through Browser Analytics. The exposed data set should help you ask questions that you didn’t know. If you do not have a Business iQ license or entitlement but you still only use EUM, you can see your data set in Web Analyze. If you find value in that data, talk to your Sales rep about exploring Business iQ’s enriched capabilities.
Q: How is the data set powered and are there limits on the data set?
A: The engine that powers the data set for analytics, an Elasticsearch-based data store, is common across both SaaS and on-premise. Because of the backend Elastic limitation, we also have some soft thresholds in terms of how you can pull data and how much data you can pull. The API is evolving to your needs, but there are certain restrictions in place in terms of how many net buckets can make its way through to a user. If there are more than 2,000, we will limit it and say the query will not work.
Depending on the type of query being issued, there are different default and max limits that come into play. These limits are outlined in our public documentation. We’re continuously looking at expanding those limits. We’ve heard your feedback and are looking at expanding the number of rows you can export from the UI and the number of rows that we show when you issue different queries.
