AEM Authoring Insights via Splunk Dashboards

In the modern era of Digital Experience Platforms, real-time data drives everything, not just delivering the right customer experiences but also enhancing operations across Business, Security, IT, DevOps, and beyond.

Splunk is a very effective Data-To-Everything platform that enables organisations to monitor, analyse, decide and act in real-time.

Splunk

• It can ingest data from any source whether on-premise or cloud
• It provides a complete view across your infrastructure, application, and services
• It provides a wide range of OOTB queries and dashboard that help provide actionable insights

Today, in this article, let’s talk about how we can easily leverage Splunk to get insights into AEM Authoring activities.

Note: AEM or Adobe Experience Manager is a product of Adobe Experience Cloud that provides robust digital content management capabilities and is a driving engine for Digital Experience Platforms built on Adobe technologies.

Scenario: For day-to-day operations and monitoring of a live platform, it's essential to keep track of activities performed by AEM authors (or business users). Is there any way to visually represent authoring insights on data dashboards in real-time?

Solution: Monitor via Splunk Search App and Dashboards

Pre-Requisites: Enable forwarding of relevant logs from AEM author instance to a Splunk Index. More details can be found here. Logs can be forwarded from both On-Premise and On-Cloud instances. Get in touch with your CSE to help enable Splunk forwarding.

Step 1: Once we have the right set of logs flowing from the AEM Author instance to a Splunk Search Index, it is very convenient to extract relevant data via Search Queries. Splunk provides fantastic documentation on searching here.

Some of the crucial authoring activities to track would be -

1. Content Edits
2. Content Replication
3. Uploading Assets
4. Workflows
5. Tree Replication

One such example for extracting content edits done by business users

sourcetype=”crx-history” EDIT | rex “EDIT (?<user>[^\s]+) \[(?<path>[^\s\]]+)\] \[(?<action>[^\s\]]+)\]” | search path=”/content/*” | timechart count by user

Most of these details are easily available in AEM's OOTB History and Access logs. For any custom business activity specific to your implementation, custom logs can be created in AEM to log the required information.

Step 2: Once we have successfully established Splunk Queries to track meaningful authoring activities, they can be used to design Dashboards and the relevant information can be presented to stakeholders visually.

Splunk provides in-depth documentation on how one can design and edit dashboard panels here.

Below are some of the examples of how it would appear -

Volume of Replication Activities

Volume of Page Edits done by Authors

Volume of running workflows

Benefits

Splunk is an efficient tool to interpret data effectively. Such dashboards help run Production Operations and Live Service Management seamlessly.

Monitoring such authoring activities help enable -

• Alerts when business users or services overload the AEM Author instances
• Easier troubleshooting in an unfortunate event of an outage
• Easier triage and debugging of any content or configuration incident
• Easier auditing of activities performed by business users
• Easier tracking of busy authoring hours
• Easier reporting of authoring activities

In this article, we have discussed only how to provide insights into AEM authoring, but this AEM and Splunk integration can be considered as a base. One can extract and chart relevant details from any of the Production AEM instances — Author(Business-User Activities), Publisher(End-User Activities), or Dispatcher(Cache-Ratios).

Happy Searching!