Configure datastreams

In this video I’m going to show you how to create a data stream, connect it to an Adobe Experience Platform SDK implementation, and validate the journey of the data. When you implement Experience Platform SDKs in your websites and mobile apps, data is sent to the Experience Platform, Edge Network. The data stream configuration sits on the Edge Network and controls where the data should go next. You can have your data streams send data to Experience Cloud applications like Adobe Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager, or you can send it to an event forwarding property where you can then add rules to send the data to third party locations. Data streams are a central part of Adobe’s data collection capabilities. Now let’s take a look at how to create a data stream in the data collection interface. I want to implement Experience Platform Web SDK on our sample website Luma. I’ve created my XDM event schema, which is the only prerequisite to getting started. I’ll log into the Experience Cloud interface and go to data collection. If you’re collecting data for an application built on Experience Platform such as Realtime Customer Data Platform, Customer Journey Analytics, or Journey Optimizer, one of the first things you want to do is make sure you’re in the right sandbox as data streams are sandbox aware. In my case, I’m in my development sandbox. If you’re not using any platform based applications, you can skip this step.

Next I’ll select select data streams from the left navigation and select new data stream. I’ll give it a name, an optional description, and select my XDM event schema.

Now I have two options. I can select save or save and add mapping. The mapping step is a feature specifically for Web SDK implementations that allows you to map your data layer object to XDM fields on the edge. I’m not going to cover that feature in this video so I’ll skip over that step by selecting save. Now I can begin a adding services. Services can be Experience Cloud applications or other capabilities like event forwarding and ID syncing. Let’s add Adobe Analytics. Here I can add my report suite. I’ll add my development report suite since I’m creating my development data stream. I can add additional report suites too such as a global report suite.

I can keep adding service this way and you’ll see that each service has configuration options, which are explained in detail in the documentation. I can save my data stream configuration and then create additional data streams for my staging and production environments. Remember if you’re implementing for platform based applications, be sure to select the correct platform sandbox before creating the data stream. The reason to create a data stream for each environment is to allow you to test and validate your implementation safely without impacting your production data. Now, when you implement Experience Platform web or mobile SDKs, you need to map your implementation to the correct data stream. If you were to implement with tags you would specify the data stream and the extension configuration. If you implement without tags, you would need to make sure you set these configurations in your code. In the Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK extension, you open the extension configuration, choose the enter values option, and then specify the prod, staging, and development data stream IDs that you want to associate with your respective tag environments. So as you publish your tag library through the workflow, it can send data to the appropriate analytics report suite platform sandbox and so on. For mobile apps, the data streams are added in the Edge Network extension. Once you’ve started implementing the SDKs, you can validate your data streams by confirming that data has landed in the services you’ve specified. For Web SDK implementations, you can also use the Experience Platform debuggers Edge Trace feature to validate the journey of Web SDK data through Platform Edge Network into your data stream. For mobile SDK, you can do similar validation tasks with assurance. So that’s a quick walkthrough of how to set up a data stream. Good luck. -