Behavioral analytics
editBehavioral analytics
editBehavioral analytics is an analytics event collection platform introduced to Elastic in version 8.7.0. Use these tools to analyze your users' searching and clicking behavior. Leverage this information to improve the relevance of your search results and identify gaps in your content.
Get started by embedding one of our JavaScript clients on your website or application and instrumenting the user actions you want to track. For example, you can track when a user searches, when they click on a search result, or when a user visits a particular page on your website.
Data and analytics are stored in Elasticsearch indices, for advanced analysis and visualization.
Even if you don’t use Elastic for search, you can use these tools to collect analytics from your application/website.
Availability and prerequisites
editBehavioral analytics is available in Elastic 8.7.0 and later. (See Migrating from 8.7 to 8.8 if you’re upgrading from 8.7 to 8.8.)
Analytics are a beta feature. Beta features are subject to change and are not covered by the support SLA of general release (GA) features. Elastic plans to promote this feature to GA in a future release.
Analytics are available to all Elastic Cloud users.
Analytics are also available to self-managed deployments that satisfy subscription requirements. View the requirements for this feature under the Elastic Search section of the Elastic Stack subscriptions page.
Your deployment must include the Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Enterprise Search services.
Documentation
editThe following documentation is available in the Enterprise Search guide:
Additional documentation is available in the following places:
-
The Behavioral Analytics Tracker Mono Repo contains the source code for the Behavioral Analytics Tracker, which can be embedded using either the JavaScript or Browser trackers:
- Read the JavaScript tracker README.
- Read the Browser tracker README.
- The Search UI documentation contains information about the Search UI Analytics Plugin.
- Behavioral Analytics uses a number of Elasticsearch APIs to manage analytics collections.
GDPR compliance
Users may be concerned about the privacy implications of analytics data collection. Behavioral analytics is fully GDPR compliant, because no personal data are collected.
To integrate the behavioral analytics client, session data are stored in two tokens:
-
User Token. A unique identifier for the user.
Stored under
EA_UIDcookie. Default time length is 24 hours from the first time the user visits the site. -
Session Token. A unique identifier for the session.
Stored under
EA_SIDcookie. Time length is 30 minutes from the last time the user visits the site.
These tokens enable the client to identify a user across sessions. They do not collect sensitive information, such as IP addresses or location data, or any other personal data.