Versions and Preview
In the Publish section of your JENTIS Tag Manager you have the option to control the versions, preview, see change logs and publish the latest updates of your JENTIS Tag Manager configuration to your website.
Versions
Tag Management configuration is the orchestration of all data streams using tags, variables and triggers to solve your data needs.
Each JENTIS Tag Manager configuration of your settings comes packed as a version. So you can edit and change your settings in a new version and have that separated into different packages from what is published to productive or staging systems.
Here you can find more details on the JENTIS account and container structure, including environments of containers: JENTIS Accounts and Containers
A list of all your versions you will find in the Publish section. Each configuration version can be in one of three states:
current edit (this one contains all the changes you did recently but yet not published)
published to live, stage or both
legacy (these can not be edited any more, but you can publish those to rollback a published version)
You can also inspect a log of all changes in a version.
Preview Monitor (Inspector)
With server side tracking architecture a configuration preview is key. As it makes transparent what is not visible to any third party or website visitor: The communication stream from user to any service provider (tools) made with your JENTIS server. The preview monitor enables you to preview and debug all data streams. Be it client- or server-side tags and their streams.
To open the preview monitor you must navigate to the Publish section that displays all versions.
The preview (“inspector” in previous JTM versions) is a tool that displays all streams of the server-to-server and client-to-server communication. That is when a tags trigger is activated and data is transmitted to a configured data receiver (Tool).
In the versions overview you can click on the “Preview”-button to open your website in preview-mode with any version (the currently edited or any of your past versions published).
Now you can see in the preview tab the button to open your website (“Start Debug Session”-button) or copy paste the parameters to manually open your website.
Please note that you can open the preview with any device or browser, it must not be opened in the same window as the current browser (that displays the data streams received in the preview).
The query parameters (jts_preview, jts_debug and jts_log) in the URL will instruct the JTM to display more information for debugging.
There are two layers to inspect the information:
frontend (in the browsers developer tools you can find information in the JS console)
backend (here the server to server communication is displayed)
In the inspector window you will see the incoming State events and what data was then send to a tool, following a tag configuration.
The following example displays a data stream to a Google Analytics tools pageview-tag. It consists of the payload and HTTP parameters so you can check if the configuration meets your requirements.
State Debugger and Data Logs view:
There are two ways to present the data of the preview. The “Data Logs” will simply log all the data streams as they appear, it also shows the JENTIS system logs. The “State Debugger” view however will group all the data streams by the state (event) they executed based on.
Publishing
When your preview results look just as required then its the right time to create and publish a new version.
You can select to publish your environment to staging, production or both. When publishing to live systems that will automatically create a new “current edit”-version for the next release cycle.
In the publish-options you can also add a commit message.
