Velo: Connecting Site Events to a Monitoring Tool (Advanced)

The Velo site logs (formerly Site Monitoring) feature allows you to connect Wix site events to an external site logging tool. This article explains how to connect your site events to a monitoring tool of your choice.

Overview

To connect your monitoring tool, you need to provide Wix with an HTTP endpoint URL. There are 2 ways to create an HTTP endpoint:

1. Build an HTTP endpoint with an external logging tool.
2. Build your own HTTP endpoint.

Once the HTTP endpoint is set, Velo sends site events in the form of JSON objects to the endpoint. The endpoint must include code for adapting the JSON objects so that your external monitoring tool can parse them.

Site Event Lifecycle

To understand your part in the connection process, it's helpful to first learn the general lifecycle of Wix site events that are connected to an external monitoring tool:

1. Velo's site logs tool records implicit and explicit site events as log entries in JSON format.
2. Velo sends the JSON objects to your HTTP endpoint.
3. Adapter code converts the JSON objects into a format that can be parsed by your external monitoring tool of choice. 
4. The adapted JSON objects are sent to your monitoring tool for analysis.

Step 1: Build an HTTP endpoint

We can set up the website monitoring by either using external logging tools or building an HTTP endpoint to achieve the same results.

Build an HTTP endpoint by using an external logging tool

You can build an endpoint by using an external tool, such as logz.io or Loggly.

Example with logz.io:

1. Go to logz.io and create an account.
2. Click Send data on the top-right of the page.
3. Filter integrations by the Most Popular category.
4. Click JSON

Read the instructions at the bottom of the page and then copy the relevant endpoint, as circled in red.

Build your own HTTP endpoint

To build your endpoint, you first need a thorough understanding of the JSON representation of Wix site events. Each site event is recorded as a single log entry in JSON format. You can see a detailed description of log entries here. 

Next you need to create adapter code to convert the JSON objects into a format that can be parsed by your external monitoring tool. You also need code that sends the JSON objects to the tool.

For your convenience, we created 2 open-source examples of adapter code that you can revise to build your own HTTP endpoint:

• Example 1:
  • Monitoring Tool: Google Operations
  • Platform: Google App Engine 
  • View example
• Example 2:
  • Monitoring Tool: Solarwinds Loggly
  • Platform: Google App Engine
  • View example

The code is specific to the examples, but you can adapt it for your tool of choice. 

Step 2: Set Your endpoint

Once you've built your HTTP endpoint, you can connect site events to your monitoring tool by setting the endpoint in your site:

1. In your site's dashboard, select Developer Tools.
2. Select Logs.
3. In Connect to Monitoring Tools (Advanced), click Open.
4. In Enter your endpoint URL, enter your endpoint URL and click Set Endpoint.

Once your endpoint is connected, Velo starts sending site events to your monitoring tool.