Validate and publish a journey

Transcript

In this video you will learn how to test and publish journeys in journey orchestration. In particular, you will learn how to enable and use test mode to validate a journey prior to publishing, and how to publish a journey, and manage the status of that journey after publication. Once you have created a journey in journey orchestration, you can activate the journey in test mode to validate that the journey is working as expected before you publish it. When test mode is enabled, the journey is live but only for individuals flagged as test profiles on the Adobe Experience platform. As such, you can test the journey for a handful of known selected profiles before publication. Furthermore, when a journey is in test mode, you can access detailed reports of journey instances that can help you verify and diagnose an individual’s path through the journey. For this video, we’ll illustrate using the following simple journey which begins when a user enters a geofence around one of the points of interest I’ve defined, using the experience platform’s location services. Journey orchestration checks whether the location of the geofence is in the U.S. or Canada.

And sends a notification that welcomes the individual to the location and indicates the outside temperature at that location in either Fahrenheit for U.S. locations, or Celsius for locations in Canada. I’ve created this journey in the canvas but have not yet published it. In order to take advantage of test mode to validate this journey, I need to have one or more profiles in the platform that are flagged as test profiles. You can create a test profile or flag an existing profile as a test profile using the platform’s streaming ingestion APIs. A thorough treatment of the streaming ingestion APIs is beyond the scope of this video. But you can see an example payload here where I’m using Postman to flag myself as a test profile. At a minimum, you’ll need to pass the identity value for the profile, which in this case is my ECID from the mobile app. And set the test profile attribute to true. In addition, you’ll want to make sure you have values populated for any profile fields that you’ll reference in the journey. If you’re creating a new profile or need to add relevant attribute values to an existing profile, you can include those in the payload as well. Now that we have a test profile ready, we can use test mode in the journey orchestration UI to validate that our journey is working correctly. To start I’ll click the test toggle button in the upper right of the canvas to turn on test mode. This brings up a set of test mode options in the left rail of the canvas. These include the option to trigger a simulated event to initiate the journey and to show log results from journey instances in test mode. Which can be helpful for diagnosing and troubleshooting problems. So now let’s trigger an event. This brings up a dialogue box where you can enter values for each of the fields in the event schema. Since I’ve already made myself a test profile, I can paste in my ECID for the mobile app as the ID and also paste in my push token. Then I can enter the location name, city, state, and the country. When I’ve entered the values I want for this test event I hit send, to send this event payload to platform to initiate the journey. I see an alert that the event was sent successfully, so now I’ll click on show log to see the results of the journey. The log results allow us to see exactly what happened in the journey. And as we go through the logs, you can see that the journey has finished on the end step. The key value is my ECID, indicating who was the subject of this journey instance. We can see enriched data that was pulled in for executing this journey. Which in this case is the weather data that we accessed in order to display the temperature in the push notification. Then we have the transition history for the journey. You can see that it started with a geofence entry event and the entire event payload is included here. The next step is the condition which was evaluated to put us on the USA path. Then the corresponding push notification action was triggered, then the journey finishes following that action. If any of these steps had resulted in an error we’d see that here and having the enriched data in the event payload can help you diagnose what went wrong. In addition to the log results which tell me that the journey completed successfully and triggered the proper push notification, I can see the actual notification I received on my phone. The temperature looks accurate but I don’t want to see all of those decimal places in the notification. So I’ll turn off test mode so that I can make modifications to the journey. I’ll go into the configuration of my push notification actions and modify the expression for the temperature to round the temperature to the nearest degree. When I’m done, I’ll turn test mode back on and trigger another test event for entering the geofence around the Adobe Lehi Office.

This looks good to me now so I’ll try another test event for the Adobe Ottawa Office to confirm that the condition and push notification work as expected for locations in Canada. I receive the expected notification for the Ottawa Office and that looks good as well. Once you are satisfied that your journey is setup and working you intend, it’s time to publish the journey. To do so, simply click the publish button in the upper right and confirm that you are indeed ready to publish the journey. Once your journey is published, you’d have four options for managing a published journey. The first is create a new version. You use this when you want to make updates or changes to an existing journey. The current version will remain active until the new version is published. Individuals that are already in the previous version of the journey when a new version is published will continue and finish out the version of the journey that they started. But any new entrants will go into the new version. Duplicate creates a copy of the current journey rather than a new version. Use this when you want to create a similar journey that does not supersede or replace the existing one. Click finish when you want to deactivate a published journey. Anyone who has already entered the journey will continue and complete the journey but there will be no new journey entrants. Finally, stop is for emergencies. Such as when you find a problem with a journey and need to stop it immediately. The difference from finish is that individuals who have already entered the journey will not go on and complete it. To summarize, in this video we’ve shown you how to enable test mode to activate a journey for test profiles so that you can test and troubleshoot prior to publication. And we’ve shown you how in test mode you can trigger test events to initiate the journey for specific test profiles as well as view journey logs that can help you troubleshoot and diagnose any problems you may find with the behavior of the journey. We’ve also shown you how to publish a journey and the various actions that you can take to manage the live journey. Including creating a new version, duplicating a journey, or deactivating the journey by either finishing or stopping it. -