Before you begin, you should be familiar with cxImpact and its administration features. Through the Portal, cxReveal users and administrators log in and are provided a subset of menu options. These available options interact with the core cxImpact application to perform the search, replay, and reporting actions.

The Portal interface allows data analysts, business owners, IT staff, and administrative users to view the status of interactions with your website, with aggregate data reports that display what visitors are doing on your site. Tealeaf users can search the saved visitor sessions and analyze them for common attributes, such as order completion. Individual visitors' sessions can be replayed with the actual data that was sent and received, so a high-fidelity recreation of the visitor's experience can be reviewed.

How cxReveal users locate sessions depends on which cxReveal components are installed.

• When the core Portal components are installed, cxReveal users can use the same search interface that cxImpact users to locate sessions.
• When the cxReveal pipeline and database components are installed, cxReveal users can use special search templates in the Portal search interface to search the cxReveal database for visitor sessions.

cxReveal Components

cxReveal provides two methods of searching for sessions: database and portal search.

• Database Search: On a dedicated workstation, a pipeline can be installed and configured to capture session attribute information from live sessions and insert them into the Search database for immediate access by cxReveal users. Database search is the preferred method for enabling users to access sessions. This method requires additional configuration and installation.

  Note: Use the Search database for more immediate and more efficient searches for sessions. Searching for sessions through the Canisters should be reserved for generalized searches that cannot be easily satisfied by session attribute search.

• Portal Search: With cxReveal, users can use the standard cxImpact search templates to search for sessions. However, we recommend preventing cxReveal users from using cxImpact templates.

Portal Components

The Tealeaf cxReveal components of the Portal application are installed as part of the Tealeaf cxImpact installer. These components consist of configuration settings, search templates, and user administration capabilities for Tealeaf cxReveal that are available through the Portal.

Note: Tealeaf cxReveal users can use the Portal components of Tealeaf cxReveal without installing the pipeline components. However, the ability to search the Tealeaf cxReveal database is not available.

Pipeline components

To enable search by session attribute, cxReveal requires a preconfigured pipeline on a dedicated workstation (the cxReveal server) to capture session attributes forwarded by the Canisters and a separate database into which the capturing session agent inserts the session attribute information for cxReveal users to search.

Note: Use of the cxReveal pipeline components requires the installation of the Portal components first.

cxReveal pipeline

The cxReveal pipeline is an instance of the Transport Service installed on the cxReveal server. This pipeline contains a minimum set of session agents to capture event hits forwarded through the Event Bus from the Canisters, extract session and session attribute information contained in them, and insert or update the extracted information into the cxReveal database.

cxReveal database

Captured session attribute information is inserted into a Tealeaf database that is designed to provide rapid access to this information and the related sessions. After the first session attribute is detected and captured in the cxReveal pipeline, the Attribute Indexing Session Agent creates a row record in the current day's table in this SQL Server database containing the session attribute information and all necessary information that is required to locate the session in the source Canister in the Tealeaf environment.

cxReveal manages captured session attribute information independently of cxImpact.

• Session attribute information is retained for 30 days in the database.
• cxReveal expects a Session Close event to indicate that a session has been closed in cxImpact.

Integration with third-party CRM systems

Tealeaf cxReveal supports integration with any third-party CRM by using one of two mechanisms.

• Tealeaf cxReveal URL API

  By specifying query-based URLs, third-party applications can retrieve Tealeaf cxReveal content, including sessions for replay, through the Portal application.

• Tealeaf cxReveal Web Services API

  Using the Web Services API, developers can integrate session search and replay into a custom application.