Custom Path Creation Process in Path Analyzer

Question

I am working with a content marketing team and we are building out custom paths for Path Analyzer. After deploying we are seeing terms like "Picked-up" and "Initializing." Are these workflow or process related? Would like a little light shed on the meaning here.

Also, I recall a tool for being able to "force" Path data to be rebuilt, instead of waiting 24 hours. This was for Sitecore 8 and I am not sure if that applies to Sitecore 9 now. Is there a good approach to manually push rebuild of Path data for Sitecore 9?

Thanks in advance for any help around this.

Answer 1

Let me explain first how Path Analyzer works behind the scenes, then I will answer you:

• PA (Path Analyzer) will hook a listener called TreeProcessor to the aggregation pipe line analytics.aggregation which will listen to all the new interactions, then the TreeProcessor will put the InteractionId and the ContactId in a temp pool called ProcessingPool
• There is a background task called TreeAggregatorAgent will pick up those Ids and start aggregating them, it will start every 15 sec for live interactions and 1 min for historical.
  • First Step is to get the interaction and the contact full details
  • Then it will match all the interactions with all the maps, in other words it will pick up the interaction and loop throw all the maps to see if the current interaction is belonging to this map or not, it will identify that from the map rules
  • If the interaction satisfies the map rules then it will merge this interaction into the current tree

back to your questions:

• I hope by custom paths you mean Funnels
• Picked-up: I assume you see this in the status column in the TreeDifinitions table. It means that the currently PA is matching all the interactions with this map, to determine which interaction will be aggregated "added" to this path and wich will be excluded. in other words executing the map rules on all the interactions to calculate the tree.
• Initializing: I assume you see this in the Path Analyzer Maps Workflow States. It just an initial state to allow the user to edit the map, nothing interesting happening, an idle state. But if you changed it to Deploy PA will add it to the TreeDefinitions table for later processing
• Force Path data to be rebuilt: Yes indeed it's an admin page, part of Sitecore, you can access it from CM [SitecoreInstanceCM]/sitecore/admin/pathanalyzer.aspx