Understanding Raw Events

Last updated:

Overview

Once the Pendo Launcher is installed and the agent is initialized, it performs two critical functions - loading guide activity and monitoring user behavior within Adopt.

While monitoring user behavior, the agent looks for several different event types such as click events, focus events, track events, and guide seen events. These events are then captured in the Raw Events tab. The agent also collects all the data you would need to run analytics on a particular activity. We can see all this data by clicking into a raw event underneath the Event (1) column.

mceclip3.pngRequirements

  • Must be an Adopt Administrator to access the Raw Events tab

Accessing Raw Events Tab

  • Click Settings (1) > Subscription (2) > View App Details (3) > Raw Events.

mceclip0.png

Understanding Event Info

When you click on the event type underneath the "Event" column you will be presented with the "Event Info" page shown below.

mceclip3.png

Every "Event Info" will typically follow the format above: Visitor ID (1) is passed through the snippet, the Account ID (2) is passed through the snippet, the current URL (3) of the event is collected as is all the content for everything an employee has clicked on. The target (4) is what the employee actually clicked on.

The "Event Info" page stores all the account and employee metadata associated with the raw event as a string. The way Pendo's analytics tool works is that when you tag a feature, that CSS rule that you entered gets converted into a regular expression that Pendo then uses to query its massive database of strings. Whenever it picks up a match, this counts as 1 feature click. Running this process for all the event data for a customer is typically completed within an hour. 

Different Event Types

  1. Focus events. Capture similar metadata as Click events - i.e grabbing UI content - but only when a user is focused on it.
  2. Load events. Typically contain Visitor and Account based activity metadata. 
  3. XHR events. Pings to the Pendo API. The Pendo application will often hit our own API. 

Enable Recording

It's recommended to click "Enable" (1) after you've completed an install and want to verify whether or not the install is receiving events. If you're unsure if data is being sent to Pendo when people click on a feature, the Raw Events tab will shows you exactly what metadata is being passed through to Pendo. 

mceclip1.png

Note: If you look through the Metadata section of Adopt, you'll notice some metadata was not passed over in a raw event. That is because all the metadata listed out in the Metadata tab is stored directly within an Account or Visitor ID object in Pendo. This is important because if an employee gets promoted, Pendo will then have 0 record of when the metadata associated with the visitor changed.