Your DXP is a valuable data source

An online platform is now an essential tool for any organization's operations. It must work twenty-four hours a day without experiencing a failure. The permanent monitoring of such a platform is therefore necessary to track activity and detect problems as soon as they arise in order to have the opportunity to solve them.

The ELK solution developed by Elastic is one of these monitoring tools for a Web platform. It has several substantial advantages.

ELK is open source.

Open Source Philosophy is one of Jahia's core values. Open-source software is a tool that is fully adaptable to a company's needs. It can be read, modified and adapted according to needs.

This approach is a significant asset in the monitoring of an online platform. Your platform corresponds to your activity, it is a specifically tailored tool whose key functions can differ greatly from those of other platforms. Unlike conventional software that can only be configured, an open source monitoring tool can be adapted in its source code to meet exactly your needs as you have defined them. It is not limited by the capabilities that the software publisher anticipated, features locked into proprietary code that no one has the legal right to modify.

From platform monitoring to activity monitoring.

The adaptability offered by open source brings out other needs than those of a server or software administrator. There are at least two others that are both important and immediate

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, with which companies will have to comply as of May 25, requires companies to monitor as closely as possible potential security breaches and make them public as quickly as possible. What information has been hacked, for how long, by what techniques and by whom? With the establishment of the GDPR, a company must have the answers to these questions.

A solution like ELK can meet this need by its ability to monitor server logs and application logs, but also to explore them in depth . Monitoring and analysis provide a broad view of the potential security issues of an online platform by enabling the detection of vulnerabilities before they may be exploited in a hostile manner.

At the same time, a marketing or sales team needs to monitor a platform closely, in particular to quickly identify the most common steps where a break occurs in the process (registration, purchase, etc.) in the user's journey. The more precise this identification, the more a company can find the solution to strengthen its user experience and increase its conversion rate. Here too, granular monitoring enables in-depth analysis and rapid detection of platform weaknesses of a digital experience platform or DXP.

Can you use ELK?

Beyond its technical requirements, what does ELK need to function? This source consists of logs. The more your platform generates logs, the more a solution like ELK will be able to give you precise information about the state of your platform. Therefore, it is important that not only your servers but also your software are configured to generate as many useful logs as possible.

We have tested and validated the implementation of an ELK system on a Jahia platform. Both solutions are fully compatible and enable the creation of a powerful DXP that can be monitored effectively and consistently.

If you want to know more about how these two solutions can be connected, we recommend the guide by our consultant Valentin André, available on the Jahia Academy.