Azure Event Hubs setup for Data Activation

The Data Activation Journey and Audience event connector for Azure Event Hubs sends all Add, Modify, and Remove events of profiles in journeys or audiences to the configured Event Hubs. This integration allows you to stream changes to audience membership in real-time to Azure for further processing, analytics, or integration with other systems.

Key features:

• Send profile add, modify, and remove events to Azure Event Hubs

• Pass profile variables along with the segmenting information

• Include custom properties for each audience or journey step

• Real-time event streaming

Before you begin

Before configuring the Azure Event Hubs, make sure you have the following set up:

• Azure Event Hubs configuration must be completed (see initial Azure Event Hubs configuration)

• Azure connection string generated

Instructions

Step 1: Configure destination

1. On the Data Activation platform, select Connectors in the left-side navigation bar.

2. Select Event Server and click New Connector.

3. Select Azure Event Hubs

The form needs the following information:

• Name: Display name of the partner Server to server integration, used throughout the Data Activation system (mandatory)

• Partner number: The type of IDs you'll receive with the segmenting information. Profiles are only sent when they have an identifier mapped to that partner number. Don't use 42 partnerNumber. (mandatory)

• Connection string: Connection string generated by Azure (mandatory)

Note: The connection string is not validated during creation. Please ensure to specify the correct data.

Step 2: Add the destination connector to an Audience/Journey

The connector can be selected in step two of the audience creation wizard or in a "step" within a journey. Sending profile variables is possible, and there are two additional data types you can pass:

• Source name (optional): Use this field to identify the source of data. The "Fill" button fills in the audience name. You can also use it with team/campaign names.

• Property - Value (optional): Key:value pairs added to the payload for this specific audience/journey step. This helps send additional information not related to the profile data itself.

Both values are on the audience/step level.

Output message format

The connector delivers events to Azure Event Hubs in the following format:

{
  "profileId": "aaaabbbb-cccc-dddd-eeee-ffffffffffff",
  "sourceId": "dc0beb89-2d63-4ec7-899a-6e986ed8932f",
  "partnerNumber": 33,
  "callType": "NEW",
  "partnerIds": ["4"],
  "profileVars": {
    "lastCategory": "5678"
  },
  "timestamp": 1234567890,
  "siteNumber": 1234,
  "sourceName": "Azure Event Hub audience 1",
  "sourceNumber": 123,
  "data": {
    "mycustomproperty1": "value1"
  }
}

Field descriptions:

• profileId: The current Data Activation profile identifier (partnerNumber 42)

• sourceId: The unique identifier of the audience/journey step

• partnerNumber: The identifier type selected when creating the connector

• callType: NEW, MODIFIED, or REMOVED (indicating the profile's status change)

• partnerIds: Contains one partnerId. Multiple partnerIds result in multiple messages.

• profileVars: Variable values configured to pass to the connector from within the interface

• timestamp: Time in milliseconds since 1970-01-01

• siteNumber: The Data Activation siteNumber of the specified instance

• sourceName: Free format text field to identify the audience in a descriptive manner

• sourceNumber: The numeric ID of an audience (empty if the message comes from Journey Orchestration)

• data: Contains custom properties defined while creating the audience or journey step

Note

The fields above always exist but can be empty if they're optional, such as profileVars or data.

Error handling

For the Azure connector, we report error codes from Azure.

Event Hubs documentation can be found on Microsoft’s website.