Using Snowy to View Events in Customer Intelligence 360

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Snowy is a field developed, multi-functional browser extension created by SAS's own Sudheesh Warrier that enables administrators to troubleshoot Customer Intelligence 360 network traffic in both directions. You can use this extension to easily search for form data such as identity events or any other event type or input field.

A few features of this plugin include:

Tracking all POST requests initiated by SAS Customer Intelligence 360 on any website.
Tracking all Form data from your request in an easy-to-read format.
Search and filter requests based on form data or events.
Option to sort on any column.
Option to enable and disable per website.

In this post, I'll provide you with an example of how this plugin works using an Internal Search Event in SAS Customer Intelligence 360.

Origins

I reached out to Sudheesh to find out the reasoning behind the name Snowy. He explained that before Snowy, he had written a small desktop plugin to analyze General Agent Logs called Tintin named after the protagonist character from one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, The Adventures of Tintin, created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi. In the comic series, Snowy was Tintin's white fox terrier companion which made for a fitting name next to it's plugin counterpart. Sudheesh said he felt the names of these characters fit for these plugins as they both have curious minds and continue to seek out what is happening around them.

As a comic nerd, I have to applaud Sudheesh's creativity in the determination of these names.

Adding the Snowy Extension

The first thing you'll need to do is add the Snowy extension to your browser. Use this link and follow the simple installation instructions.

https://github.com/sassoftware/ci360-extensions/tree/main/code/snowy

Once installed, the Snowy plug-in can be viewed on the Customer Intelligence 360 tab of the browser developer tools (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.

As an example, I created a new Internal Search Event based on a form submit for the SAS Store website.

Figure 2

Creating an Internal Search Event

I used Form Submit Custom Event and selected the Search Products box at the top of the site. The name of the form is populated in the selection box at the bottom of the interface (Figure 2).

In Event Details I selected Any Page from the drop-down menu because the search box appears on every page of the site (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Next, I defined the search name associated with this search event and defined the Field ID (woocommerce-product-search-field) and Field name (s). To check these I used the inspection window on the SAS Store website and did a search. In the payload of the submit event I found the product-search-field ID and name (Figure 4).

Figure 4

I also chose to identify the number of search results returned from the next page load and used a page element as the identifier.

Figure 5

I captured the number of search results here I had to select the string, "Showing all 8 results". To get the numeric value, I changed the value for the Return field to Between, entered "all" in the From field, and results in the To field. This returns the number of results embedded in the string (Figure 5).

Finally, I published the event.

Viewing Events in Snowy

There are two ways to view events in Snowy. Use the Network tab to view all raw events. These are events automatically created and are not configured in Customer Intelligence 360. You only need your site to be tagged to view these raw events in the Network tab (Figure 6).

Figure 6

The second way to view events is in the Event Stream tab. This tab will show all raw events and events configured in Customer Intelligence 360. To view anything in this tab you will need to add the following information about your tenant.

External API gateway address
Tenant ID
Client Secret

These can all be accessed under Access Points in Customer Intelligence 360 General Settings and then added to the Settings tab of Snowy (Figure 7).

Figure 7

Finally I used Snowy to check that my new Internal Search Event is working correctly. I used the Event Stream tab, began a network stream and performed another search. Snowy displayed a formatted list of events collected by the tag.

The first event was a change event created when I typed the search term in the search field (Figure 8).

Figure 8

After performing the search a few more events appeared. This included the EDU Internal Search Event I previously configured confirming the event is working properly. The list also includes a submit event, unload event and a Page View Event for viewing the new search page.

Figure 9

Key attributes like Datahub ID, timestamp, Session Id and Visitor ID are listed in the table. These attributes can then be used to filter and search these events. (Figure 9).

Please be aware that Snowy is a field developed plugin with no formal support mechanism from SAS.

For more information about creating events in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and using Snowy visit the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Learning Subscription page below. Specifically 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.

Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.