WEAVE@cloud + Cloudant == flexible Customer Engagement via Totango, Mixpanel etc

3 min read

WEAVE@cloud is CloudBees new cloud-based data integration platform (formerly known as "FoxWeave"). With WEAVE@cloud we are going to greatly simplify the process of communicating data between your CloudBees applications and your other SaaS and On-Premise Apps and DBs, allowing application compositions that extend beyond your CloudBees application.

A little while ago, we went about adding user activity logging to the WEAVE@cloud service. This wasn't just for use by the WEAVE@cloud team. The CloudBees "Developer Success" team also wanted access to this data.

The Developer Success team have been long-time users of Totango , which is a very popular Customer Engagement service. They love Totango and have built lots of their day-to-day processes around it. It seemed obvious then that we would go ahead and integrate Totango directly into WEAVE@cloud. Job done, right?

WEAVE Backend to Totango (Direct)

The above solution would have worked perfectly well for us, but we also liked the idea of owning a raw copy of the event data ourselves (Vs handing it directly to another service). That way, we would have the flexibility to analyze and re-analyze it using whatever tools and services made sense (or even to build our own dashboards if we needed to). For example, some other team members at CloudBees use Mixpanel to gain insight into service usage patterns. I tried Mixpanel myself and really liked the idea of being able to use it alongside Totango.

So instead of logging user activity directly from WEAVE@cloud to a Service like Totango or Mixpanel, we decided to store the event data into our own Cloudant NoSQL database.

WEAVE Backend to Cloudant

Then, using WEAVE@cloud (of course), we were able to very easily sync the activity data from Cloudant to whatever analysis tools we needed e.g. Totango and Mixpanel. Setting up these WEAVE@cloud syncs took no more than 5 mins.

Cloudant to Totango and Mixpanel

via a WEAVE@cloud Integration

This solution is working very nicely for us:

  1. We still have ownership of our data (by storing it in a Cloudant DB), and so retain the ability to do other interesting things with that data if the opportunity arises.

  2. Using WEAVE@cloud , we can easily leverage the benefits of SaaS Engagement analysis tools (Totango, Mixpanel etc).

  3. If we ever want to, we can start using other services . We just hook that service into WEAVE@cloud and start syncing activity data.

  4. If we ever need to, we can perform custom analysis on the raw data (or build custom dashboards) to analyze the data in a way not supported by the engagement tools we use on a day-to-day basis.

  5. The Developer Success team are happy.

  6. We're eating our own dog food by using WEAVE@cloud to sync the data from Cloudant to Totango and Mixpanel.

Tom Fennelly
​Engineer
CloudBees

Stay up to date

We'll never share your email address and you can opt out at any time, we promise.