Site Catalyst help - What is server call analysis and what's entailed in a Reporting Suite Audit?

[zain_az]

Hi all, 

My question might seem a bit generic but I'll try to frame it in a context so someone here can answer my question. Basically a new user of Adobe site catalyst and recently joined the company where this is used, they had implemented this couple of years back. I'm park of a team where we were told to do a reporting suite audit and server call analysis. I have a basic knowledge of using the various main features of site catalyst like searching for reporting suite and fetching basic KPI's and seeing the billing details within Admin tab of what pages are generating more hits.

In general, what would a reporting suite audit usually entail? Would it be looking at the total number of reporting suites currently implemented?  Also, server call analysis, what kind of analysis does it encompass (I'm thinking the leadership wants to know the most top pages/tags generating most server calls) - anything that could be part of this analysis?

Again, I feel I'm a newbie to this I'm still learning by watching training videos on the site - any advice/feedback on the above would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

[shekhardhiman]

Hi Zain,

Thanks for reaching out to Adobe Community.

I will try and see if I can answer this question. Before performing the Report Suites Audit, a couple of questions you can keep in mind:

1. What is the business need for your organization? (Single Report Suite, Multiple Report Suite, Multi Suite tagging, Roll up or Global Report Suites)

2. Once you know your business asks then you can see the Report Suite structure in the Admin and propose any changes if need be.

3. You can also see what all variables you have enabled to track the data. This would give you a clear picture of whether you are collecting the right data for your website or not.

Around server call analysis, 

1. You can see the primary server calls, secondary server calls and total number of server calls.

2. You can also see if there are any duplicate calls being made, since server calls cost money.

For more information on this, you can reach out to your Account Manager.

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

[warrensander · Accepted solution]

If can look under 'admin -> account activity report' assuming this wasn't turned off by your admins (or if you are and admin you can see it) and it shows information by month by report suite (and total) of page views, exit links, custom links, file downloads and total. From that you can derive some numbers. (this same info is available also in the dashboards, hit layout, add content on the left, custom reportlets -> data content -> and look at those reports. Not easily extracted but you can get numbers.

Also if you are an admin you can look at the 'billing' report in the admin console. it takes 8-10 business days to populate but you get primary, secondary, total server calls by report suite.

I create a monthly report where I take the data from the account activity report totals, billing totals and do month over month comparisons of the calls with graphs to show contract year etc.  and contrast the account activity data with the server call data in another graph (they tend to follow the same graph but if you have more secondary or 3rd or 4th report suite calls they can diverge a bit.

[zain_az]

Shekhar_Dhiman wrote...

Hi Zain,

Thanks for reaching out to Adobe Community.

I will try and see if I can answer this question. Before performing the Report Suites Audit, a couple of questions you can keep in mind:

1. What is the business need for your organization? (Single Report Suite, Multiple Report Suite, Multi Suite tagging, Roll up or Global Report Suites)

2. Once you know your business asks then you can see the Report Suite structure in the Admin and propose any changes if need be.

3. You can also see what all variables you have enabled to track the data. This would give you a clear picture of whether you are collecting the right data for your website or not.

Around server call analysis, 

1. You can see the primary server calls, secondary server calls and total number of server calls.

2. You can also see if there are any duplicate calls being made, since server calls cost money.

For more information on this, you can reach out to your Account Manager.

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

Thanks! This definitely helps.

On the same topic, do you know if there is a way to capture all the eVars, sProps and events tied to my Adobe site catalyst? What I'd like to show is all the variables that make up our website and how they're integrated into site-catalyst for user reporting purposes.

[warrensander]

a couple of more things.

1) ask adobe for the 'analytics health dashboard' this is a tool they use that interfaces with the API and pulls every prop/evar/event and the top 100 values and other information. However, I haven't see (gotten) an updated version with the extended evars (76-100) and events (101-999) that the recent release turned on. but if you aren't using those you should have no problems. But adobe needs to supply this to you.

2) for the top pages calls (s.t) are pageviews and top custom links (s.tl) are custom links (both in site content report area.  you can do some things but others need planning. You can break pages down by custom links to find the top custom links on a page. And visa-versa you can break down the top custom links by page name to find where they fire. File downloads are there also assuming you've turned on recording downloads (and have your s.linkDownloadFileTypes variable setup correctly for all the extensions that are downloads on your site. and s.trackDownloadLinks=true also you should make sure that for exit links s.trackExternalLinks and s.linkInternalFilters are set correctly.

3) as for which report suite gets the primary and which gets the secondary calls (and if developers mess up and code s.account="suite1,suite2"; or s.account="suite2,suite1"; the first report suite gets the primary the second one gets the secondary (1/2 price) and the 3rd, 4th etc count as secondary calls. what we do is we have a prop where we put the s.account variable so we can report on that. Unfortunately this has to be done in your s_code or tag manager because you can't access the s.account value in a processing rule. Once you are collecting the s.account info and I suggest the s_code version and other 'audit' type information you can get a clearer picture of what's happening on your site. I believe adobe will deduplicate report suite names so s.account="suite1,suite1,suite1"; will only record one primary server call and toss the others but I am not 100% on that (maybe adobe can answer that but I'd be pretty sure this is the case) but having our report suites in a prop has helped find a number of issues where commas were not used or report suites were misspelled etc.

[shekhardhiman]

Hi Zain,

You can check all the enabled eVars. sProps and events in the Admin Tools > Report Suite Settings. You can see what all data is being captured under those variables and their friendly names as well. You can also debug using Adobe Debugger to read the image requests. You can install the debugger from here: 

https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/sc/implement/debugger_install.html

Thanks!

[zain_az]

Thanks so much Warrensander! I didn't even know such reporting existed under admin account activity. It shows the data by all the reporting suites.

In terms of server call analysis, I saw the primary/secondary sever calls, and with that data, I can see which reporting suites are costing us the most (is there anything else a server call analysis is suppose to provide?) There isn't a way to see the top 10 - 25 pages which are calling the most sever calls/tags being fired or is it?

warrensander wrote...

If can look under 'admin -> account activity report' assuming this wasn't turned off by your admins (or if you are and admin you can see it) and it shows information by month by report suite (and total) of page views, exit links, custom links, file downloads and total. From that you can derive some numbers. (this same info is available also in the dashboards, hit layout, add content on the left, custom reportlets -> data content -> and look at those reports. Not easily extracted but you can get numbers.

Also if you are an admin you can look at the 'billing' report in the admin console. it takes 8-10 business days to populate but you get primary, secondary, total server calls by report suite.

I create a monthly report where I take the data from the account activity report totals, billing totals and do month over month comparisons of the calls with graphs to show contract year etc.  and contrast the account activity data with the server call data in another graph (they tend to follow the same graph but if you have more secondary or 3rd or 4th report suite calls they can diverge a bit.

[zain_az]

Shekhar_Dhiman wrote...

Hi Zain,

You can check all the enabled eVars. sProps and events in the Admin Tools > Report Suite Settings. You can see what all data is being captured under those variables and their friendly names as well. You can also debug using Adobe Debugger to read the image requests. You can install the debugger from here: 

https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/sc/implement/debugger_install.html

Thanks!

Thanks Shekhar, but I believe you can't find all of the above for one website,rather it only allows to download data by one reporting suite. I'm going to this section by Admin>Reporting Suite.

edit: So it lets you select multiples reporting suites and download then it populates all those items in an excel sheet. (Is this the only way to extract this info)

[zain_az]

warrensander wrote...

a couple of more things.

1) ask adobe for the 'analytics health dashboard' this is a tool they use that interfaces with the API and pulls every prop/evar/event and the top 100 values and other information. However, I haven't see (gotten) an updated version with the extended evars (76-100) and events (101-999) that the recent release turned on. but if you aren't using those you should have no problems. But adobe needs to supply this to you.

2) for the top pages calls (s.t) are pageviews and top custom links (s.tl) are custom links (both in site content report area.  you can do some things but others need planning. You can break pages down by custom links to find the top custom links on a page. And visa-versa you can break down the top custom links by page name to find where they fire. File downloads are there also assuming you've turned on recording downloads (and have your s.linkDownloadFileTypes variable setup correctly for all the extensions that are downloads on your site. and s.trackDownloadLinks=true also you should make sure that for exit links s.trackExternalLinks and s.linkInternalFilters are set correctly.

3) as for which report suite gets the primary and which gets the secondary calls (and if developers mess up and code s.account="suite1,suite2"; or s.account="suite2,suite1"; the first report suite gets the primary the second one gets the secondary (1/2 price) and the 3rd, 4th etc count as secondary calls. what we do is we have a prop where we put the s.account variable so we can report on that. Unfortunately this has to be done in your s_code or tag manager because you can't access the s.account value in a processing rule. Once you are collecting the s.account info and I suggest the s_code version and other 'audit' type information you can get a clearer picture of what's happening on your site. I believe adobe will deduplicate report suite names so s.account="suite1,suite1,suite1"; will only record one primary server call and toss the others but I am not 100% on that (maybe adobe can answer that but I'd be pretty sure this is the case) but having our report suites in a prop has helped find a number of issues where commas were not used or report suites were misspelled etc.

I called client care and was told no such thing exists as analytics health dashboard'.

I was told to lookup each reporting suite one by one and download the report from ADMIN console. I've got 140 reporting suites granted not all are being utilized. What would be nice is if we can fetch all the variables like you mentioned in a dashboard.

[kalendaniel]

@zain have you had any issues with the adobe health dashboard running and getting stuck somewhere during the report running?  Is there any resources anywhere for supprot on this excel macro enabled document that you know of?  The instructions are rather weak and I've set it up with task scheduler but whether I run it manual or automated with task scheduler it has all kinds of issues.  Curious if maybe its an add-on or something getting held up with the server calls going on with automated reports because it can be a real pain running a 20 minute report and it freezing like this (especially when I have to check every now and then all 18 of our sites/report suites with individual health dashboard files).