Let’s Talk About Access Points and Snowy
In my July post, I covered using Snowy to view events in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. If you didn't catch that post, you can find it here. We discussed adding the Snowy extension, creating your event, and viewing the event in Snowy using event streaming configurations. The event streaming tab listed all raw events and events configured in Customer Intelligence 360. Before you can use the Event Streaming tab, you need to configure it in Snowy's settings with the following information:
- External API gateway address
- Tenant ID
- Client Secret
This information can be accessed under Access Points in Customer Intelligence 360 General Settings.
But wait...what's an Access Point? Where do I find that information? Do I have to set up this Access Point?
In this post, I'll answer these questions and more. We'll walk through the different types of access points, which access point you'll use for Snowy, how to set up that access point and how to configure event streaming.
Let's Talk About Access Points
Customer Intelligence 360 can integrate with external applications using an access point. An access point is configuration data defined in the Customer Intelligence 360 user interface that enables the bidirectional transfer of data between Customer Intelligence 360 and users or on-premises systems via a permanent secure connection.
There are four types of access points that can be configured in Customer Intelligence 360:
- The General Access Point enables you to receive events and data from SAS Customer Intelligence 360. This access point, along with a general agent, can be used to connect to on-premises data, content management systems, and installations of SAS Real-Time Decision Manager or SAS Event Stream Processing.
- The Direct Access Point, along with the direct marketing agent, are used in direct marketing tasks to integrate with on-premises marketing channels.
- The Optimize Access Point, along with the Optimize agent, integrates on-premises customer data and Customer Intelligence 360 in order to optimize direct marketing campaigns within specified constraints.
- Finally, the Diagnostics Access Point and its agent are used to diagnose issues with Customer Intelligence 360 events. The diagnostics agent can filter by a given ID type and value to identify problems with events generated in Customer Intelligence 360. It can help ensure that the intended and the actual behavior of the events match.
The diagnostics access point is the access point to use when checking events in Snowy. There are a few reasons for this:
- The diagnostic access point is intended for troubleshooting and monitoring events
- The diagnostic access point allows you to filter by identity type instead of event type. This is extremely useful when having to search through multiple identities to find the event matching the identity you are looking for.
Creating the Diagnostics Access Point
To begin creating a diagnostics access point, navigate to General Settings on the left side bar of the Customer Intelligence 360 home page, find Access Points in the External Access subheading, and select New diagnostics access point (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.
To configure the access point simply:
- Enter a name
- Click Add to add the credentials
- And set the access point to Active (Figure 2)
Figure 2
Click Done and you've created your access point! Now let's go to Snowy and add the new tenant configuration!
Event Stream Configurations
First, go to the Settings page of the Snowy Extension. If you haven't added the Snowy extension yet, visit my July post.
Once installed, the Snowy plug-in can be viewed on the CI360 tab of the browser developer tools (Figure 3).
Figure 3
On the Settings tab, you'll enter the External API gateway address, Tenant ID, and Client Secret.
To access the External API gateway address, navigate back to Access Points in General Settings of Customer Intelligence 360. The External API gateway address can be found there (Figure 4).
Figure 4
Next, click on the Access Point you created earlier. That's where you will find the Tenant ID and Client Secret (Figure 5).
Figure 5
After all information has been filled in, click the green button that says Activate this tenant. Now you're ready to view events! As stated earlier, to view events configured in Customer Intelligence 360 use the Event Stream tab. When you're there, make sure to click the Start button and select your filter condition (Figure 6).
Figure 6
For more information about access points, agents and connectors, see the course titled Using Agents and Connectors with SAS Customer Intelligence 360 in the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Learning Subscription. Specifically, to see a demonstration of a diagnostics access point and agent see the video titled Demo: Configuring and using a Diagnostic Agent in that course. For an overview of the snowy plugin see the course titled Website Data Collection and Configuration in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and for more information about creating events see the course titled SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Fundamentals.
- Customer Intelligence 360 User Guide
- Customer Intelligence 360 Administration Guide
- SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Learning Subscription for Customers
Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.
