Device Analytics With Hydrolix

Hydrolix adds WURFL Device Detection to its Analytics Platform

The Hydrolix data ingestion, storage, and query platform just got more powerful. With the new add-on option for ScientiaMobile’s WURFL device detection, media companies, advertisers, eCommerce, and financial companies can add detailed smartphone, tablet, and smart TV information to their data lakes.

With WURFL inserted into the data analysis workflow, device information can achieve its rightful place next to other data dimensions like geographic location, app/player performance, CDN usage and performance, video content served, and Internet Service Provider (ISP) performance.

The Device-Aware Video Platform Challenge

One of the keys to Over-The-Top (OTT) video’s success is its ability to understand the end user. By better understanding users’ devices and their capabilities, video platforms can achieve:

Better quality of experience through higher resolution and use of advanced codecs.
Improved analytics to troubleshoot device-related problems and identify trends.
Optimization of CDN use and planning through analysis, implementation, and load-balancing to make better use of new video codecs.
Greater advertising yield through profiling of users’ technology.

An OTT video platform that is managing a multi-content delivery network (CDN) environment is a perfect use case for the Hydrolix with WURFL solution. Hydrolix can efficiently ingest, store, and query streams of log data from CDNs, and WURFL can enrich the log data to include valuable device information.

ScientiaMobile provides detailed device information for the OTT and streaming video industry, including video codec playback (e.g. HEVC and AV1), display resolution, RAM, chipset, and GPU.

Start Your Free Trial

Interested in trialing Hydrolix’s platform with device detection observability at terabyte scale for a fraction of the cost of other observability platforms?

Hydrolix Makes Device Detection Easy

Hydrolix now offers an integration with ScientiaMobile’s WURFL, the leading real-time device detection solution that can identify more than 100,000 device profiles, giving you full observability into customer devices so you can provide superb user experiences. Once you purchase a license from ScientiaMobile, you can activate WURFL device detection within Hydrolix with only a small configuration change to a Hydrolix transform file.

Hydrolix’s ScientiaMobile integration gives you full observability into more than 500 WURFL device capabilities, including virtual capabilities that combine the logic of several core device capabilities. This includes detailed information about the type of device, the browser being used, the screen size, operating system, supported video codecs, and more. By ingesting this data into Hydrolix, you can visualize device information with dashboards and query your data to get detailed insights into your audience.

ScientiaMobile provides weekly updates to ensure you have the latest information about new user devices. WURFL’s Updater automatically checks for a new device data snapshot from your customer vault, downloads that data, and then reloads the WURFL engine—all without interruptions to Hydrolix’s data ingestion. And WURFL is used by the largest enterprises on the internet, so you can rest assured that WURFL’s multithreaded operations can handle your data ingestion at scale.

OTT video platforms can use the Hydrolix/WURFL solution to make mission-critical decisions about when to invest in new video codecs, like AV1. You can watch a demo of this here.

By analyzing data from ScientiaMobile’s av1_hardware_decode_level field, you can determine how many of your customers are using devices with chipset hardware that can decode the av1 video codec. With this information, video platforms can identify the adoption tipping point when their audience is ready and efficiently time their investment in av1 encoding and playback infrastructure.

Setting Up the ScientiaMobile Integration With Hydrolix

Setting up the ScientiaMobile integration with Hydrolix is simple. To get started, you need a Hydrolix cluster and a ScientiaMobile account. Sign up for Hydrolix if you haven’t already.

Next, you need to get your license key from the my.scientiamobile.com account page.

After you have your license key, you need to configure your transform files in Hydrolix to use ScientiaMobile’s WURFL device detection. Hydrolix uses transform schemas to determine how data should be mapped to a table in a Hydrolix datastore. Each data source has its own transform schema, while a Hydrolix table can have many data sources (and therefore many transform files associated with it). Learn more about how to write a transform.

ScientiaMobile works with Hydrolix by default. You just need to add a `”wurfl”` section to each transform where you’ll be ingesting WURFL data. Add the following to the transform, replacing `{YOUR-SCIENTIAMOBILE-LICENSE-KEY-HERE}` with your ScientiaMobile license key.

"wurfl": {
    "enabled": true,
    "update_url": "https://data.scientiamobile.com/{YOUR-SCIENTIAMOBILE-LICENSE-KEY-HERE}/wurfl.zip",
    "header_mapping": {
      "User-Agent": "user_agent"
    }
  }
```

The above configuration does the following:

Ensures that WURFL is enabled (`”enabled”: true`).
Configures the `update_url` to point to your licensed WUFL definition.
Sets the `header_mapping` key to be a map of HTTP headers that WURFL will use for classification.

Next, you need to provide a mapping in your transform schema for each field you want to include in your Hydrolix table. Any fields that aren’t added won’t be mapped to the database. Here’s an example for the field physical_screen_width.

```
{
  "name": "physical_screen_width",
  "datatype": {
    "type": "string",
    "index": true,
    "source": {
      "from_automatic_value": "physical_screen_width"
    },
    "format": null,
    "resolution": "seconds",
    "default": null,
    "script": null,
    "suppress": false
  }
}
```

For more information on field mapping options in a transform file, see the transform structure documentation. Examples of full transform files for CDNs such as Fastly and Edgio that use WURFL data are included in the documentation.

Next steps

Start ingesting user device data to provide your customers an optimal video experience, improve analytics, and maximize your advertising potential. If you aren’t a Hydrolix user yet, schedule a demo to learn more.