DEVELOPERS BLOG

Analytics: What are you waiting for?

There has been a lot going on this year, especially in early summer with COVID-19 on everyone’s minds, so I wanted to draw your attention to something you may have missed. In July 2020, BlackBerry launched v8.0 of the BlackBerry Dynamics SDK. With this release came a powerful feature to help developers and line of business owners get some insight in to their app usage and user experience. The BlackBerry Analytics SDK was merged into the BlackBerry Dynamics SDK. This means that any app built with the BlackBerry Dynamics SDK v8.0 and above has the ability to leverage analytics without any extra development work. There are 2 caveats to that statement:

1.     If you previously integrated the BlackBerry Analytics SDK there is a small change you need to make on iOS and Android .

2.     If you want to get more granular analytics you can add some code in your app. See Android/iOS API references.

 

BlackBerry Analytics is included in most newer BlackBerry Spark and UEM licenses, but check out the licensing guide here or ask your BlackBerry Account rep to find out more.

 

Now let's assume you have everything in place to try this out. Your BlackBerry Dynamics integrated app is built using v8.0+, you have the proper licenses, and you have reviewed and met the prerequisites. The next step is entitling your users. In the screenshots below we enable all users. You can choose a subset of them using groups or individual users if needed.

 

Step 1: Select your group.

Step 2: Click the ‘+’ button to add an app.
Step 3: Search for BlackBerry Analytics entitlement.  (Note: if you are missing this you need to contact your account team to get the proper licenses)
Step 4: Click Assign
Step 5: Check that the entitlement was added to your group.

Once you have added this entitlement, BlackBerry Analytics will be setup for all apps on BlackBerry Dynamics SDK v8.0 and higher. Visit https://analytics.blackberry.com/enterpriseportal/ and login with your account to see the data as it becomes available. Note it can take up to 24 hours for data to feed in to the analytics engine.

 

One final thing to note. If you would like to make use of this analytic data in other ways you can check out the BlackBerry Analytics data retrieval REST API https://developers.blackberry.com/content/dam/developer-blackberry-com/api-reference/analytics/index.html

 

If you have any issues or general comments please reach out to us here: https://developers.blackberry.com/us/en/support.html

 

Happy analyzing. 

About Brent Thornton