This article provides an overview of the Diagnostics dashboard and the intended use cases. We also provide a definition of the concepts you need to be aware of as you navigate the dashboard.
The Diagnostics dashboard provides simple insights that your ad operations, yield management, and technical development teams can leverage to maintain a healthy integration with Vistar. By using the Diagnostics dashboard, you can quickly identify network or venue-related performance issues and take proactive measures to resolve those cases promptly.
Maintaining a healthy integration is critical in ensuring that your campaigns perform well and that you do not lose revenue as a result of integration-related issues.
The dashboard contains the following two tables:
- Network Health Overview—View network-level information about the health of your integration, such as the number of requesting venues in your network and trends in performance.
- Insights—Build reports to view network health metrics at a more granular level, for example at the DMA or venue level, by day or over a couple of days.
The data in the Insights tables is refreshed roughly every 30 minutes and stored indefinitely, starting on April 12, 2019. The network overview table is refreshed daily as there are columns in that table that are populated based on the previous day's data. For common questions and answers about the Diagnostics dashboard, see Integration health assessment guide.
Diagnostics terms
The following list outlines general diagnostics terms you can expect to come across while you navigate the dashboard, and their definitions:
- Requested spots—Total number of requested ads. We provide this information at the venue-level or network-level and based on geographic or time groupings.
- Leased spots—Total number of ads Vistar returns to the requesting media owner.
- Spent spots—Total number of ads played by the media owner.
- Manually expired—Total number of ads a media owner expires, for example, because venues are sold out from direct sales. We strongly advise that a media owner expires any ads that they cannot play.
- Spend rate—This metric indicates the percentage of ads played by a media owner at the network or venue-level. A high spend rate is an indicator of a strong integration. Networks with strong integrations generally register high revenue numbers on our advertising platform.
- Manual expiration rate—The percentage of ads a media owner expires. This value should be kept low, as a media owner should aim to play as many of the ads we return in order to generate revenue.
- Average Display Time Latency (seconds)— This column tracks how close ads are played relative to the requested display time you set in your ad requests. As a general requirement, and to maintain a healthy integration with Vistar, venues must play ads within 15 minutes (900 seconds) of when they were requested. If the values in this column are outside of the +/- 15 minute bounds, follow the steps in the integration health assessment guide to rectify.
- Average PoP Time Latency (seconds)— This column tracks premature or delayed proofs of play (PoPs) to Vistar. You must notify Vistar after an ad is played by hitting the proof_of_play_url located in the ad response within 15 minutes. Timely PoPs promote healthy campaign budget delivery and improve buyer trust in your inventory. If the values in the pop time latency column are outside of the +/- 15 minute bounds, follow the steps in the integration health assessment guide to rectify.
Using the Diagnostics dashboard
Here are the main ways that you can utilize the dashboard:
- Self-monitor the performance of your network during integration tests
- Regular network health assessments to promptly identify performance issues
Self-monitor the performance of your network during integration tests
Following the development of your integration with Vistar or after a major integration update, we require that you perform a series of 3-5 day tests (as described in the Integration testing process). Our goal is to ensure you have a strong integration after you go live on our platform. We set up each test to resemble a real-world campaign scenario and work with you to ensure that any arising technical issues are resolved before you come onboard.
While developing and testing your integration, you can build diagnostic reports from the dashboard to check that:
- All the venues in your test are successfully making requests for ads from Vistar’s ad server.
- All ads returned by Vistar are played and playbacks reported in a timely manner.
- Any ads that you do not play are successfully expired.
Vistar’s checklist for a healthy integration is outlined in Initial Integration Test.
Regular network health assessments to promptly identify performance issues
We recommend a weekly check of your Diagnostics dashboard to validate that both the network averages and venue-level insights are aligned with the checklists outlined in the Initial Integration Test.
At the network-level, you can quickly see trends in the performance of your integration. We compare your network’s performance averages from the previous day against the last full month and then calculate the differences. Trending indicators (such as the blue icons shown below) appear to show when your network is performing well.
When performance trends poorly, the indicators shown are red in color. See Build a diagnostics report to learn more about the indicators.
