What are BlueConic firehose connections?
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft event queueing systems provide key capabilities including many-to-many, asynchronous messaging that decouples senders and receivers. These systems work at scale and can handle the potentially millions of events coming their way in real-time via a BlueConic firehose streaming connection.
BlueConic captures data and events at the customer level for known and anonymous users. Handing over this information to your cloud data store in real time gives your team complete freedom in how to process, enrich, and improve existing reports and applications and invent new ones. You can use BlueConic firehose connections to stream BlueConic profiles and event data to other systems in real time.
BlueConic firehose connections:
Use cases
BlueConic customers use big cloud vendor firehose technologies to:
Enrich profiles, for example, using machine learning algorithms and then sending the data back to BlueConic in new profile properties for segmentation and targeting
Send data to data analytics tools for customer journey analytics, multi-touch attribution, and next-best actions (NBAs)
Send profiles to data lakes and data warehouses such as Google BigQuery or Amazon Redshift for modeling and analysis
Customers use these tools to further enrich their customer data, gaining insight into customer segments, conversion events, and next-best actions (NBAs).
What kinds of data can you stream?
Unified profiles or only selected profile properties
Dialogue views, clicks, and conversions
Events from the BlueConic dialogues 'When' tab
UTM parameters of landing pages
Record of all dialogues a customer saw before completing a specific conversion goal
Page view events
Note: Firehose connections do not send BlueConic Timeline events or associated lifecycle information.
Why use a firehose connection instead of batch uploads?
In a word, timeliness. Batch uploads run on a schedule, but firehose streaming connections run in real time, as events occur. When a visitor's profile is updated or an event is triggered, the firehose connection sends a message.
Real-time customer data
The phrase "real time" can mean different things in different contexts, so let's be specific about the timing details:
Changes to profile property data (and therefore the segments the profiles are part of) are sent to the stream after being "in rest" for 2 minutes, meaning that no changes occurred in the past 2 minutes.
Events are sent every 10 seconds.
Monitoring firehose traffic data
With the potential for passing large amounts of data to the firehose, you'll want to monitor your firehose traffic data. In the BlueConic settings > General section, you can monitor your traffic metrics by clicking Firehose traffic breakdown. A pop-up window opens with a list of all streaming goals and the firehose traffic they generated. See the article on General Settings for more details.
Account usage limits
Note: By using a firehose connection, you will create a stream of data on the network and infrastructure of BlueConic and its third-party suppliers. To prevent excessive use of this capacity by users, certain fair use policies (subject to change by BlueConic) apply to the use of this connection. The usage limits on this traffic that are applicable under this fair use policy can be found by clicking on the Settings icon in your BlueConic tenant and by selecting the General settings. The aggregated maximum amount of traffic you are allowed to generate under our fair use policy is specified in the column “Subscription” of the “Firehose traffic” table. Your actual usage is also specified.
If at any time you need to generate more traffic than the specified fair use maximum in the Subscription column and you want to prevent additional charges, stop using this connection or contact your BlueConic Account Manager for a quote immediately. Either way, your continued use of this connection constitutes your acceptance of any additional charges or fees as they may apply.