Related pages:


This section describes data prerequisites, requirements, validation rules, limitations, and actions related to creating Business Journeys. 

Before You Begin 

Before creating Business Journeys ensure that the feature is enabled in your environment. You also need to review data prerequisites, validation rules for both names and Business Journey definition, and general limitations.

Enable Business Journeys

Business Journeys is enabled by default on SaaS environments. But on on-premises installations, the feature is disabled. To enable Business Journeys, an Administrator needs to configure certain properties in the Controller Settings.

Before starting the Event Service:

  1. Open the events-service-api-store.properties file.
  2. Change ad.bizoutcome.enabled=false to true.

Business Journey page displays a flow map detailing the business workflow across milestones. You can hide the flow map by changing the value of the analytics.business.outcomes.flowmap.enabled property to false in the Controller Settings.

Enable Flow Maps

As you create milestones, a flow map detailing the business workflow is automatically displayed in the Business Journey page. Additionally, selecting a Business Journey opens it in a new window with the flow map enabled. This behavior is controlled by the analytics.business.outcomes.flowmap.enabled property in the Controller Settings. Setting its value to true indicates that flow map is enabled for Business Journeys.

Data Prerequisites for Defining Business Journeys

Analytics creates Business Journey composite events by collecting events and fields that you have already captured as analytics data. In addition to built-in analytics data sources, custom event data can also be used to create Business Journeys. As you define the milestones in the Business Journey, you specify which events to use and which fields to extract from the events.  You can extract fields collected by default or custom fields that you have configured for collection. You can add milestones with custom events created from Analytics API Keys. 

You need to know your starting and ending event and the clearly defined steps in between. To collect additional fields in the events being captured by Application Analytics use one or more of the following techniques:

Restrictions and Caveats

  • Business Journey names are case-insensitive and stored as all lowercase. This means that two definitions named application and Application, for example, are considered a duplicate.
  • The event type drop-down displays the lowercase definition name. 
  • Use the lowercase name for advanced queries.
  • The primary key must be unique and not null.
    If the primary key holds null values, the underlying milestone events will not be stitched together to form a Business Journey event.
  • Choose the primary key carefully, in particular, the cardinality of the values. The primary key is expected to uniquely identify and join milestone events together to form a meaningful business workflow. If the milestone events are misidentified by the primary key, inaccurate milestone events will be joined to produce faulty results.
  • The primary key name cannot be changed unless the Business Journey definition is in the draft state. 
  • The Business Journey definition name cannot be changed after the definition is deployed. You can rename it while the definition is in the draft state.
  • If a field related to a custom event is renamed, update the Business Journey definition created from the custom event for the renamed field to be correctly extracted. 

Validation Rules

This section describes certain rules to validate Business Journey definition and naming convention for Business Journeys, milestones and extracted fields. You can save your work as a draft without invoking validation. When you are ready, you can use Validate and Save to check that your definition is acceptable. Saving the Business Journey definition does not enable the Business Journey. Data is not captured until you actually enable the Business Journey. Also, see Business Journeys Life Cycle.

Validation Rules for Names

This section describes the validation rules for naming Business Journeys, milestones, and extracted fields. Validation rules are not applied when you save your Business Journey definition as a draft. Validation is only invoked when you use Validate and Save. The validation rules include the following:

  • Names of Business Journeys, milestones, and extracted fields must have an alphanumeric string containing a-z, A-Z and 0-9. The only special character allowed is the underscore "_".
  • Special characters such as spaces, hyphens, dashes are not allowed in the names.
  • Primary Key fields must have the same name (label) in all milestones in a Business Journey definition. The field name itself may vary in different event types.
  • The primary key name cannot be changed unless the Business Journey definition is in the draft state. See Business Journeys Life Cycle for more information.

  • The following reserved field names cannot be used to name milestones or fields in your Business Journey definition.

    • pickupTimestamp
    • eventTimestamp
    • totalTime
    • userExperience

Validation Rules for Business Journey Definition 

A Business Journey definition must contain:

  • A minimum of two milestones.
  • A unique set of filters. More than one milestone with the exact same set of required and optional filters is not allowed in the same definition.
  • Unique milestone names.
  • Extracted field names must be unique (except the Primary Key field).
  • There must be one Primary Key field per milestone. 
  • Slow threshold duration must be greater than 30 minutes.

Create a Business Journeys Definition

  1. From the Controller UI, access Analytics > Business Journeys. 
    A list of existing Business Journeys (if any) displays.
  2. Click +/Add and start defining the milestones in your business workflow.
  3. To define milestones, click +Add Milestone.
  4. Type a name.
  5. From the Type drop-down, select the source of the analytics data, such as Transactions, Logs, Browser Requests, Mobile Requests, and custom events.


  6. For each data source, specify values for the mandatory filters that identify the data you want to capture. 
    In the case of Transactions, specify the Application, Tier, and Business Transaction for each milestone you intend to create. In analytics, Tier represents a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) service, such as an authentication service, in your application environment. Business Transaction is the cross-tier processing path representing the request for a service provided by the application.

  7. Define the milestones that comprise your workflow and the fields to extract at each milestone. You can reorder the milestones in the UI using drag-and-drop.
    Once you name the primary key, you can not change the name unless the definition is in the draft state. See Business Journey Life Cycle for more information.
    The primary key field is not populated for subsequent milestones because the primary key might have different field names in the event type for different milestones.

    Fields that are extracted by default by Business Journeys are not shown. Refer to the table describing Filters and Fields.

  8. Save the definition using one of the following actions:

    • Save As Draft: saves the definition in draft form. No validation is performed and you can return to the definition to complete it at a later time. 
    • Validate and Save: Performs necessary validation. Use this option when you have completed all milestones. The definition is saved, but is not enabled.
  9. On the Health Thresholds tab, you can specify the values that determine acceptable performance. 
    See 'Business Journeys Health Thresholds' on Business Journeys for more details on how the user experience value is calculated.
    When you finish creating the Business Journey definition, you are ready to enable it.
  10. Select it from the Business Journeys list and click Enable. The option is grayed out until you select a valid draft Business Journey from the list. To enable a Business Journey, the state must be "Valid Draft".

Business Journeys Life Cycle

This section provides detail on each phase of Business Journeys life cycle.

Draft

You might not have all the required details at the beginning and therefore, creating the definition may involve multiple temporary versions. Use Save As Draft to capture your initial, incomplete definition and place your Business Journey into a Draft state.

  • No analytics data is processed and no Business Journey events are created in draft state, so there is nothing to query.
  • The primary key can be changed when the Business Journey is in draft state.
  • The draft state is less restrictive with respect to validations and supports most update operations. 

Valid Draft

Once the definition has the required details, use Validate and Save, which transitions the definition into the Valid Draft state. You can still modify the definition in this state. Business Journey events are not captured until you enable the definition.

Enabled

When you are ready to process data, use the Enable action. This transitions the definition to the Enabled state. Most definitions will spend their lifetime in the Enabled state.

  • Configuration changes are synced to the Analytics Servers every two minutes. Therefore, once you enable a Business Journey definition, there could be a delay of up to two minutes for events to be generated.
  • Incoming events are processed, composite Business Journey events are created and stored. You can query for the Business Journey events.
  • You can modify the definition in the following ways:
    • Add, rename, or delete fields for extraction (non-default fields)
    • Add, rename, or delete milestones

User Disabled

At some point, you may want to disable the Business Journey. The Disable action transitions the Business Journey definition to the User Disabled state. In this state, no incoming events are processed. Existing events can still be queried.

You can update the definition in the following ways:

  • Add, rename or delete fields for extraction (non-default fields)
  • Add, rename or delete milestones

Deleted

When you no longer need the Business Journey definition, use the Delete action. This is the final phase of the definition's lifecycle. In this state, no incoming events are processed for it. Existing Business Journey events are not available for query.