Configuration and Debugging with AEP Assurance (formerly Project Griffon)

This blog post is a part of the AEP Mobile SDK blog series.

In Web development, your browsers’ dev tools are powerful enough to let you debug almost everything. On top of it, there are tons of 3^rd party extensions – Switchboard, Tagtician, Omnibug, etc – to make it easier and better. Hence debugging has always been fun on web pages.

Sadly, that’s not the case with Mobile apps; debugging with Mobile apps has always been a big pain. The only thing we have is packet sniffer like Charles and Fiddler to check the traffic sent by the apps, which allows you to see the headers but nothing more than that.

To make this situation easier, Adobe has come up with something very exciting called AEP Assurance.

What is Project Griffon AEP Assurance

AEP Assurance is a brand new, innovative product from Adobe Experience Cloud to help users easily inspect, validate, debug data collection and experiences for Mobile apps.

It comes as an AEP Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) extension, which helps in connecting apps to a web service and reports everything that happens within the Experience Platform Mobile SDKs, so you can easily analyze it in a simple and clean UI.

AEP Assurance provides you seamless connection, Instant validation of SDK event, Analytics events and location services. Here is sneak peak into AEP Assurance.

In order to debug your app with PG, you need to first get provisioned for it, and configure it in Tags, App code and PG UI. Let’s take these configurations one by one.

Configurations required in Tags and app:

1. Install AEP Assurance extension and add it to your existing library and build.
2. Now, if you’ll go to environments and check the install instruction, you will notice that Project Girffon configuration statements has been added.
   
3. Next step is to create Deep Link for your app:
   <intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
<data
android:scheme="http"
android:host="open.my.app"
</intent-filter>


   http://open.my.app is now my deep link. You can name it whatever you want.
   

AEP Assurance Configurations:

1. Configurations in AEP Assurance:
2. Give your session a name. (any friendly name would do)
   
3. Provide deep link of your app in Base URL field. The same deep link which you created in previous steps > Click Next.
4. As you click Next, you will see a deep link with session ID, a QR code and a PIN as below
   
   Now, either you can use link or scan QR code to open Bus Booking app on your device.
5. To open app in emulator, just simple copy the link with session ID and paste it in App link testing
   
6. As your open will begin to launch, AEP Assurance screen will pop up asking for PIN. This PIN is required to tie your app session with AEP Assurance.
   Now, enter the PIN from PG UI to PG screen on app and tap “Connect” button as below:once connected, you will start seeing PG Icon on your app.
   
7. Now check your PG UI in Experience Cloud. You will see a list of events with timestamp and event source. You can click on any event to see more details.
   
8. Now, go to “Event List” under Adobe Analytics. You will see list of Analytics events. To validate context data sent from app and Tags, tap on Track State and check the Event Details.
   
   Similarly you can debug other products such as Target, AAM, etc via PG.

Isn’t AEP Assurance exceptional?

PG not just reports what beacons, and the values within, are being sent but also helps you see whether your processing rules are working fine or not.

End-to-end, throughout debugging.

“Note: Griffon can only record beacons coming from the native apps or the native screens of a Hybrid app. It cannot log beacons coming from the webview screens. We have information that this functionality is on Adobe’s roadmap as a future enhancement to Griffon. As of today, for debugging webview, you still need to rely on something like Charles.”

You can also checkout the recording of webinar, we recently held, on migrating mobile implementation from SDK 4.x to new AEP Mobile SDK.

I hope you enjoyed this blog, and should you have any questions, let us know by emailing us at info@softcrylic.com.

Update: Adobe has deprecated Project Griffon extension as it has been officially re-named it to AEP Assurance. Please use the new AEP Assurance extension going forward.

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