Through the Portal, Tealeaf users and administrators can access and create reports to monitor data that is captured by Tealeaf. Tealeaf provides a set of predefined reports that enable rapid access to aggregated counts, sums, and averages of important metrics on your web application. These reports provide immediate value to your Tealeaf solution and you can ask and answer key questions about application issues, overall health, and performance.
The Tealeaf reporting solution provides regular collection of data, which is rapidly gathered and aggregated for insertion into Tealeaf databases. This data is immediately available for use in reporting.
Tealeaf data
When visitor session data is captured by the Passive Capture Application, it is forwarded to a Processing Server, where more processing is done to analyze its contents for, among other things, reporting. As hits are processed, the Processing Server maintains counts of individual events and other session-related data. At 5-minute intervals, these counts are gathered from the Processing Server and sorted into hourly buckets within the Reporting database. This data is then available for reporting.
Data used for reporting
For reporting purposes, the key data objects are events, dimensions, hit attributes, and session attributes. These user-created entities can be designed to monitor key metrics in your web application and in the Tealeaf system.
- Term
- Description
- Session Attribute
- A session attribute is a variable that is associated with the session that can be updated during or after the session is complete. For example, Tealeaf provides a session attribute to track the login identifier of visitors to your web application. After this session attribute is properly configured, it contains the login identifier as soon as it is detected.
- Hit Attribute
- A hit attribute is a pattern of text that occurs in an individual request or response. For example, you can create a hit attribute to detect for the presence of your web application's error message, such as "Uh-oh, an error!", in the response.
- Event
- An event is a marker for a condition in the session data. You can create events to monitor session size, length in seconds, and many more metrics. Additionally, you can use events to tabulate the counts of specific patterns in the data. For example, you can create an event that is triggered based on the "Uh-oh, an error!" hit attribute. For reporting purposes, you can then tabulate the count of these errors in your visitors' sessions.
- Dimension
- A dimension is contextual information that is captured as part of the recording of an event. For example, if you created the event to detect for the presence of "Uh-oh, an error!" on the page, you can associate a dimension with the event to record the URL where the error occurred. This dimensional data is recorded with the event when it occurs.
Databases
Aggregated reporting data is stored in SQL Server databases.
- Product
- Description
- cxImpact
- cxImpact session data is aggregated and stored in the Reporting database. More performance information about the Tealeaf system is stored in the Statistics database.
- cxReveal
- Through the cxReveal database, Tealeaf users have much more rapid access to sessions based on captured and tracked session attributes, which are stored for searching in the database.
The cxReveal database is a component of cxReveal, a separately licensed component of the Tealeaf CX platform. For more information, contact your Tealeaf representative.
Packaged reports
Tealeaf provides a number of reports to enable you to quickly discover value in your Tealeaf solution without requiring the additional configuration of any data objects. These packaged reports provide useful insight into the sessions, events, visitors, and activities on your web application.
Through the Portal, administrators of the system can access a number of reports, which can be used to monitor overall system health and also to diagnose specific issues with the Tealeaf solution.
- Type
- Description
- Event Activity
- This Portal report enables review of counts of active events.
- Activity Reports
- These reports summarize sessions, events, and web application performance metrics. Tealeaf provides a dashboard that summarizes web application performance issues that are contained in the Activity reports.
- Performance Reports
- These reports provide insight into client-server performance between your visitors' web browsers and your web server.
Methods of reporting
You can create reports with the different options available in the Portal. As needed, reports created in the Report Builder or in the Top Mover reporting tool can be scheduled for execution and delivery to interested stakeholders.
Report builder
After you acquire some understanding of the available data objects and their functions, you can begin building your own ad hoc reports through the Portal. The Report Builder provides a simple, drag-and-drop interface through which you can add events and dimensions to create interesting perspectives on the visitors and their behaviors within your web application.
Top Movers reports
Top Movers can be configured to monitor the changes in key metrics over time for your site. For example, if you are interested in session size, you can create a Top Mover to monitor the changes in session size over time. Through a reporting interface that is similar to the Report Builder, you can create reports to monitor these changes so that spikes and valleys in expected size can be quickly identified and managed before they become issues.
Scorecards and dashboards
If you licensed cxVerify, you can create scorecards and dashboards that are based on the report components that you create in the Report Builder. These visual report cards can be generated as needed and delivered to stakeholders on a regularly scheduled basis. They are also available as needed through the Portal.
Reporting concepts
This list compares the common reporting concepts in traditional analytics with the Tealeaf equivalent functions:
| Analytics | Tealeaf |
|---|---|
| Slice | In Tealeaf, you can create data slices by configuring multi-dimensional reports for specific fact values. |
| Dice | The Report Builder does not currently support data dicing. |
| Drill down | Tealeaf enables drill-down on reporting data to the underlying sessions from which the report values were extracted.
Note: Because of query complexity, Tealeaf provides limited support for drill-down when a whitelist or blacklist of values is configured for use with the report. You can drill into whitelists or blacklists limited to 30 values across all Segment dimensions of the report. Drill-down on other configurations, including Top N dimensions, is not supported.
|
| Roll up | Tealeaf data is aggregated at the hourly and daily level by the Data Collector, which polls the Canister data at scheduled intervals. |
| Pivot | In the Report Builder, you can pivot report data across multiple report groups that share common dimensions. |
Data Collector
Every 5 minutes, the Data Collector polls each Processing Server for the counts of events, hit attributes, and session attributes. This independent process typically requires no additional configuration.
Tealeaf administrators can configure the Data Collector features and performance by using a number of Portal-accessible settings.
The Data Collector can be monitored through the Portal.
Report security
In the Report Builder Security tab and through the Report Manager, you can select the users and groups who can view and edit the current report.
In the left panel, you can configure the administrators of the report by available user group.
- Report administrators have all of the permissions available to specified users of the report. If a user group is given administrator access, user-level access is automatically granted to the user group, even though that access is not visibly displayed in the window.
- Report administrators can edit and delete the report.
- Members of the
AdminandcxView Admingroups are administrators for all reports in the system. In the right panel, you can configure the users of the report by available user group. - Report users can see the report, change parameters, export it, and save it under a new name.
Technical Site Metrics dashboard
The Technical Site Metrics dashboard provides high-level insight into the current activities on the web application that is monitored by Tealeaf. You can also monitor activities and processing in your Tealeaf system, including the Short and Long Term Canisters and all Tealeaf servers.
To access the Technical Site Metrics dashboard, select Dashboards > Technical Site Metrics.
Through the Portal, you can monitor activities and processing in your Tealeaf system. Through a single dashboard, you can keep tabs on overall activities, page and session metrics, page generation and network round trip times, and counts of visitors and sessions.
The Technical Site Metrics dashboard is available for all Portal users, regardless of permissions. However, these reports can be edited by admin users only. This dashboard is available in read-only format to all Tealeaf licensees of the cxImpact product. Configuring the dashboard requires the cxView license.
- Activity Reports - This tab contains dashboard components that identify key metrics on session data that occurs in the current hour.
- Performance Report - This tab contains dashboard components that indicate page performance metrics for each hour of the current day.
Viewing Source Reports
From the upper-right corner of each dashboard component, you can review the source report. To view the source report for a dashboard component, click the View icon. The source report is loaded.
Activity reports source
In the Report Builder, you can review the events, dimensions, filters, reporting period, and other configurations that define the Activity report. Search drill-downs on the report data enable searching for the sessions that are aggregated into the report.
Some reports can be loaded directly from the Report Builder. For grouping purposes, the names for reports on each tab begin with a different string identifier.
Performance reports source
Source Performance reports can be viewed through the Portal. To view Performance reports, select Analyze > Performance Reports.