topic What is the best way to handle sequential event funnels? in Splunk Search

What is the best way to handle sequential event funnels?

andynu — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:05:21 GMT

Given a sequence of general to specific events (like product browsing a pages, followed by particular product pages). What is the best way to bring information from the browse events into the results for the product event?

log example

 time=1 session=1 pageType=browse name=NewStuff resultsCount=3
 time=2 session=1 pageType=product product=a
 time=3 session=1 pageType=product product=b

In the example a user hit a browse page with three products, and clicked through on two of them. I would like to transform those events into a table like this:

desire result

| session | srcBrowseName | Product |
| 1       | NewStuff      | a       |
| 1       | NewStuff      | b       |

Notice that I have to repeat data from the browse event for each of the product page events. I have an inkling that this could be accomplished with a subsearch, perhaps a subsearch of a |transaction session startswith="pageType=browse".

Re: What is the best way to handle sequential event funnels?

gkanapathy — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:32:13 GMT

Maybe:

pageType=product | join session usetime=true earliest=true [ pageType=browse | fields - resultsCount ]

is something like what you need?

Re: What is the best way to handle sequential event funnels?

andynu — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:20:09 GMT

Thanks!

pageType=product |join session usetime=t earlier=t [search pageType=browse | fields + resultCount]

Unfortunately |join seems to be very particular about which types of fields it will work on, some of my fields that in independent searches extracted matching field values did not work as the join parameter.