08 December 2014

Event Monitoring + Salesforce Wave = BFF


At Dreamforce 2014, I led a session entitled Audit Analytics that described the integration between Event Monitoring and Project Wave.

Combing the two solutions is a no brainer. Event Log Files generates CSV files on a daily basis. The Wave platform makes sense of CSVs for business analysts. 

While you can watch the video at http://bit.ly/DF14AuditAnalytics, there are a couple of tips, tricks, and best practices I want to share when using Event Log Files with the Wave platform:
  1. Consider storage requirements. Event data isn't like CRM data - there's a lot more of it. One org I work with logs approximately twenty million rows of event data per day using Event Log Files. That's approximately 600 million rows per month or 3.6 billion every half year. That means you will need to consider what data you import and how you manage that data over time.
  2. Understand your schema. There are tons of great use cases that Event Log Files solve; however, the secret sauce here is understanding what's possible already. Download a sample of files and take a look in Excel or run the head command in your terminal (i.e. head -n 2 VisualforceRequest-2014-10-21.csv) to get a sense of the kinds of lenses and dashboards you want to create. Read more about the lexicon of possible field values in the Event Log File Field Lexicon blog posting.
  3. You should convert the TIMESTAMP field in each log file to something that Wave can understand and trend in their timeline graphs. Event Log Files provides an epoch style TIMESTAMP (i.e. 20140925015802.062) rather than date format (i.e. 2014-09-25T01:58:02Z). I usually build this transformation into the download process. Read more about this transformation process with my Working with Timestamps in Event Log Files blog posting.
  4. You should de-normalize Ids into Name fields where possible. For instance, instead of uploading just USER_ID, you should also upload USER_NAME so that it's more human readable. If you don't do this before you upload the data, you can always use SAQL to help normalize name fields. Read more about using pig and data pipelines to de-normalize data before importing it into Wave with the Hadoop and Pig come to the Salesforce Platform with Data Pipelines blog posting.
  5. Merge files across days to reduce the number of datasets you have to manage (i.e. awk -F ',' 'FNR > 1 {print $0}' new_* > merged_file.csv) rather than treating each day of log files as a new dataset.
  6. Import your data using the dataset loader from Github: https://github.com/forcedotcom/Analytics-Cloud-Dataset-Utils/releases. This is the easiest way to automate dataset creation and management.
Combining large scale event data about the operational health of your organization with the power of an incredible visualization platform has the ability to change how you separate truth from fiction with your users.

01 December 2014

Working with Timestamps in Event Log Files

An event in a log file represents that something happened in our application along a timeline of events.

As a result, every Event Log File contains a TIMESTAMP field which represents the time each event happened in GMT. This is useful for understanding when the event happened, for correlating user behavior during a time period, and for trending similar events over various periods of time.



The TIMESTAMP field in Event Log Files is stored as a number. This simplifies storage costs since date formatting a string comes with a storage cost and can be more difficult to transform latter. This can become a challenge when importing Event Log File data into an analytics system that requires a different date time format. And there are a lot of different kinds of date time formats that are possible.

For instance, Salesforce Analytics Cloud's Wave platform accepts a variety of different date time formats:


This means that you will have to convert the TIMESTAMP field for each row within an Event Log File into something that Wave or any other analytics platform can interpret.

I usually convert the TIMESTAMP when I download the file, that way it makes it easier to do it in one step.

To convert it, I use a simple AWK script that Aakash Pradeep wrote, in my download script or in my Mac terminal. It takes the input from a downloaded file like Login.csv and creates a new file, substituting each TIMESTAMP field value with the right format:
awk -F ','  '{ if(NR==1) printf("%s\n",$0); else{ for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if(i>1&& i<=NF) printf("%s",","); if(i == 2) printf "\"%s-%s-%sT%s:%s:%sZ\"", substr($2,2,4),substr($2,6,2),substr($2,8,2),substr($2,10,2),substr($2,12,2),substr($2,14,2); else printf ("%s",$i);  if(i==NF) printf("\n")}}}' Login.csv  > new_Login1.csv

Date time formats can be a challenge in any system and this utility provides me a quick and easy way of converting date time formats into something I can use with my analytics platform of choice.