Connect to Sitefinity Insight

Overview

You connect each Sitefinity CMS instance separately and to a specific data center. If you are working in multisite mode, you can choose a specific data center to track each of the sites. That is, to track the sites separately.

IMPORTANT: To ensure communication between Sitefinity Insight and Sitefinity CMS is not restricted and consequently tracking and personalization are functioning, you need to modify your system’s firewall settings. For details, see the Troubleshoot connection issues section below.

NOTE: When you connect your site to Sitefinity Insight, the output page cache will be cleared. Clearing all output cache items on a production website might result in a significant performance impact. Avoid doing this if your site is under heavy load.

Connect to Sitefinity Insight

To connect to Sitefinity Insight, you provide your Sitefinity Insight access key. Perform the following:

  1. Navigate to Administration » Sitefinity Insight.
  2. Enter your access key.
    For more information about generating an access key, see Connect your sites to Sitefinity Insight.

    NOTE: To generate an access key, you need to be a Sitefinity Insight Account administrator.

  3. Click Connect.

You can now define which sites to track and in which data center(s) to collect visitor data.

NOTE: By default, Sitefinity CMS-tracked data is labeled as Website. In Sitefinity Insight, you can see all data sources reporting to your data center in the data center's Data integration tab page. You can modify the connection name and thus the label of the Sitefinity data source by navigating in Sitefinity to Administration » Settings » Advanced settings » DigitalExperienceCloudConnector and editing the value in the Connection name field.

Troubleshoot connection issues

In case you lose connection between Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight, to troubleshoot the problem, make sure you investigate the following potential issues.

Issue Troubleshooting
Sitefinity Insight server is down This is a temporary issue. May be caused by network issues, services down, and others.
Firewall not properly configured

IMPORTANT: You can modify the configuration of the firewall only for self-hosted Sitefinity CMS. The following procedure does not apply to Sitefinity SaaS.

Login to your server to validate the connectivity to Sitefinity Insight.

You must modify your firewall settings. Make sure the outbound internet connectivity of the Sitefinity CMS server is not restricted for the following addresses:

  • https://insight.sitefinity.com
    This is the main web application for Sitefinity Insight. Sitefinity CMS access this URL server-side to leverage Sitefinity Insight features and reports.
  • The following Sitefinity Insight API servers for TCP connections on 443 port:
    • https://api.insight.sitefinity.com with IP: 52.252.156.53 - USA location.
    • https://nl-api.insight.sitefinity.com with IP: 20.54.177.123 - The Netherlands, EU location.
    • https://au-api.insight.sitefinity.com with IP: 20.92.129.255 - Australia location.
    • http://ca-api.insight.sitefinity.com with IP: 20.200.88.229 - Canada location.
    • https://sg-api.insight.sitefinity.com with IP: 20.197.96.81 - Singapore location.
  • These servers are responsible for collecting all behavior data of visitors.
    The Sitefinity CMS server uses this service to initiate the data collection process and to power A/B testing, personalization by persona, lead scoring, and campaigns. In case the Sitefinity CMS server cannot reach this service, Sitefinity CMS will not be able to leverage Sitefinity Insight features and collect data.

    IMPORTANT: Sitefinity Insight used to provide *.dec.sitefnity.com API servers. These servers will be decommissioned starting January 31, 2024. To avoid disruption in connectivity of your servers, you must generate new Sitefinity Insight access keys. The new keys automatically use the new servers.

    NOTE: Ensure that your Sitefinity CMS firewall rules enable connections to the Sitefinity Insight servers listed above.

  • https://cdn.insight.sitefinity.com for TCP connections on 443
  • https://dec.azureedge.net for TCP connections on 443 port
    This is the CDN that distributes the Sitefinity Insight Insights dashboard, accessible from the Marketing dropdown menu of the Sitefinity CMS administration UI. Because this is content delivery network, there is no single IP range for it. Instead, you can setup the firewall based on the DNS record. In case you do not have the DNS record, all Sitefinity Insight features will function normally in Sitefinity CMS, apart from the Insights dashboard.
Access key deactivated

Generate a new access key to restore the connection. For more information, see Access keys.

NOTE: Make sure the access key grants permissions to the same data centers as the deactivated key.

Config files issues between environments In case you are working in multiple environments and each environment has different Sitefinity Insight configuration, verify that the proper configuration is in place. In addition, verify that the Sitefinity Insight API key grants access to the proper data center.
Sitefinity Insight license expired Contact sitefinitysales@progress.com.
Data center issues To check whether the data center is deleted from Sitefinity Insight, try to reconnect via the Sitefinity Insight connector. If the data center is not deleted, it is displayed in the Data centers dropdown menu as an option you can choose.

NOTE: Another reason for not seeing the data center in the Data centers dropdown is that the access key you are using does not have permissions for this data center.

In case you do not find your issue listed in the table above, you can examine the Sitefinity CMS error logs or contact Sitefinity Support.

Track specific sites in multisite environment

In case you are working with multiple websites on one Sitefinity CMS instance, you can select which specific Sitefinity CMS site(s) to track. For example, you may want to exclude from your data a subset of sites that are not relevant to your marketing department and their data can dilute the results from the other sites you want to track. In addition, you can isolate customer journey data for individual websites powered by a single Sitefinity CMS instance in specific data centers in Sitefinity Insight. Thus, digital marketers can get data-driven insights that are specific to the brand or website they manage.

By default, no Sitefinity CMS site in multisite environment is tracked. To select one or more specific sites to track and in which data center to store site data:

  1. Navigate to Administration » Connectivity » Sitefinity Insight.
  2. Once you connect to Sitefinity Insight, under Site Tracking, click Set tracking.
  3. From the Sitefinity Insight data centers dropdown, select a data center.
  4. Select the checkboxes of all sites whose data you want to store in the data center you selected.

    NOTE: Once you associate a site with a data center, you cannot associate it with another data center. You can, however, associate more than one site with one and the same data center.

    IMPORTANT: If you have enabled content tracking, this operation can take long time, even hours. On some steps of the operation, the progress bar may look frozen, but Sitefinity Insight in fact works on the background. Please be patient and let the operation finish. Until the operation is complete, you cannot add more sites to this Sitefinity Insight data center.

  5. In the Tracked activities tab page, under Track all activities for..., click Change.
  6. Choose Selected sites and mark the checkbox next to the sites you need to track and collect data from.

Once you are done, the selected sites automatically start sending data to Sitefinity Insight.

Track Sitefinity CMS website sub-domains

To track Sitefinity CMS websites and their sub-domains, you configure the tracking cookie sf-data-intell-subject to be visible to all relevant applications:

  1. Navigate to Administration » Advanced settings » DigitalExperienceCloudConnector.
  2. Set the Tracking cookie domain setting to .sitefinity.com.

As a result, the cookie is visible to all systems hosted on sub-domains, for example sitefinity.com and partners.sitefinity.com.

Stop tracking Sitefinity CMS sites

Depending on your requirements, you can stop tracking your websites, or disconnect Sitefinity CMS from Sitefinity Insight.

To stop tracking your Sitefinity CMS sites from your Sitefinity Insight data center, perform the following:

  1. In Sitefinity CMS backend, navigate to Administration » Sitefinity Insight.
    The Connector for Sitefinity Insight screen appears.
  2. For each site you want to stop tracking, click Actions » Change and in the window that opens deselect the sites you want to stop tracking and save your changes.
    Alternatively, if you want to disconnect all tracked sites, click Delete.

To disconnect your Sitefinity CMS instance from Sitefinity Insight, perform the following:

  1. In Sitefinity CMS backend, navigate to Administration » Sitefinity Insight.
    The Connector for Sitefinity Insight screen appears.
  2. Click Disconnect.
  3. To confirm, click Yes, Disconnect.

RESULT: All tracking activities for your websites will be stopped, all personalization segments will be disabled and Sitefinity CMS will not connect to your Sitefinity Insight data centers.

Configure content analysis

PREREQUISITES: To use content recommendation, you must have a paid subscription. For more information, contact Sitefinity sales.

RECOMMENDATION: We recommend enabling content analysis, because it is a prerequisite for advanced AI-driven features, such as content recommendations, and improves automatic segment discovery.
For more information, see Content recommender and Automatic segment discovery.

Content analysis is a prerequisite for the Content recommender feature. To learn more, see Content recommender.

To enable or disable content analysis, perform the following:

  1. In Sitefinity CMS backend, navigate to Administration » Sitefinity Insight.
    The Connector for Sitefinity Insight screen appears.
  2. For each site you want to start or stop tracking, click Actions » Enable content analysis or Disable content analysis.

    IMPORTANT: When you enable the content analysis, the operation can be time consuming – up to several hours. If the progress bar appears frozen, this does not mean that Sitefinity Insight is not working in the background. To produce the desired result, allow the operation to finish. Until then, you cannot add more sites to this Sitefinity Insight data center.

    IMPORTANT: When you disable content analysis, Sitefinity Insight deletes all stored data related to this feature.

Increase your Sitefinity skills by signing up for our free trainings. Get Sitefinity-certified at Progress Education Community to boost your credentials.

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