Install and configure Kafka Connect and the Adobe Experience Platform Sink Connector
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Go to https://github.com/adobe/experience-platform-streaming-connect/releases and download the latest official release of the Adobe Experience Platform Sink Connector.
Place the download file, streaming-connect-sink-0.0.14-java-11.jar, onto your desktop.
Go to the folder on your desktop named Kafka_AEP and navigate to the folder kafka_2.13-3.1.0/config. In that folder, open the file connect-distributed.properties using any Text Editor.
In your Text Editor, go to line 34 and 35 and make sure to set the fields key.converter.schemas.enable and value.converter.schemas.enable to false
Save your changes to this file.
Next, go back to the folder kafka_2.13-3.1.0 and manually create a new folder, and name it connectors.
Right-click the folder and click New terminal at Folder.
You'll then see this. Enter the command pwd to retrieve the full path for that folder. Select the full path and copy it to your clipboard.
Go back to your Text Editor, to the file connect-distributed.properties and scroll down to the last line (line 86 in the screenshot). You should uncomment the line that starts with # plugin.path= and you should paste the full path to the folder named connectors. The result should look similar to this:
plugin.path=/Users/woutervangeluwe/Desktop/Kafka_AEP/kafka_2.13-3.1.0/connectors
Save your changes to the file connect-distributed.properties and close your Text Editor.
Next, copy the latest official release of the Adobe Experience Platform Sink Connector that you downloaded into the folder named connectors. The file that you downloaded before is named streaming-connect-sink-0.0.14-java-11.jar, you can simply move it into the connectors folder.
Next, open a new Terminal window at the level of the kafka_2.13-3.1.0 folder. Right-click that folder and click New Terminal at Folder.
In the Terminal window, paste this command: bin/connect-distributed.sh config/connect-distributed.properties and click Enter. This command will start Kafka Connect and will load the library of the Adobe Experience Platform Sink Connector.
After a couple of seconds, you'll see something like this:
You can now interact with Kafka Connect using Postman. To do so, download this Postman Collection and uncompress it to your local computer on the desktop. You'll then have a file that is called Kafka_AEP.postman_collection.json.
You need to import this file in Postman. To do so, open Postman, click Import, drag and drop the file Kafka_AEP.postman_collection.json into the popup and click Import.
You'll then find this collection in the left menu of Postman. Click the first request, GET Available Kafka Connect connectors to open it.
You'll then see this. Click the blue Send button, after which you should see an empty response []. The empty response is due to the fact that no Kafka Connect connectors are currently defined.
To create a connector, click to open the second request in the Kafka collection, POST Create AEP Sink Connector. You'll then see this. On line 11, where it says "aep.endpoint": "", you need to paste in the HTTP API Streaming endpoint URL that you received at the end of exercise 15.3. The HTTP API Streaming endpoint URL looks like this: https://dcs.adobedc.net/collection/d282bbfc8a540321341576275a8d052e9dc4ea80625dd9a5fe5b02397cfd80dc.
After pasting it, the body of your request should look like this. Click the blue Send button to create your connector. You'll get an immediate response of the creation of your connector.
Click the first request, GET Available Kafka Connect connectors to open it again and click the blue Send button again. you'll now see that a Kafka Connect connector is created.
Next, open the third request in the Kafka collection, GET Check Kafka Connect Connector Status. Click the blue Send button, you'll then get a response like the one below, stating that the connector is running.
Open a new Terminal window by right-clicking your folder kafka_2.13-3.1.0 and clicking New Terminal at Folder.
Enter the following command:
bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list 127.0.0.1:9092 --topic aep
You'll then see this. Every new line followed by pushing the Enter button will result in a new message being sent into the topic aep.
You can now send a message, which will result in being consumed by the Adobe Experience Platform Sink Connector, and which will be ingested into Adobe Experience Platform in real-time.
Let's do a little demo to test this.
Go to https://builder.adobedemo.com/projects. After logging in with your Adobe ID, you'll see this. Click your website project to open it.
On the Screens page, click Run.
You'll then see your demo website open up. Select the URL and copy it to your clipboard.
Open a new incognito browser window.
Paste the URL of your demo website, which you copied in the previous step. You'll then be asked to login using your Adobe ID.
Select your account type and complete the login process.
You'll then see your website loaded in an incognito browser window. For every demonstration, you'll need to use a fresh, incognito browser window to load your demo website URL.
Click the Adobe logo icon in the top left corner of your screen to open the Profile Viewer.
Have a look at the Profile Viewer panel and the Real-time Customer Profile with the Experience Cloud ID as the primary identifier for thi currently unknown customer.
Go to the Register/Login page. Click CREATE AN ACCOUNT.
Fill out your details and click Register after which you'll be redirected to the previous page.
Open the Profile Viewer panel and go to Real-time Customer Profile. On the Profile Viewer panel, you should see all of your personal data displayed, like your newly added email and phone identifiers.
You may see some experience events based on past activity.
Let's change that and send in a Callcenter experience event from Kafka into Adobe Experience Platform.
Take the below sample experience event payload and copy it into a Text Editor.
You'll then see this. You need to manually update 2 fields:
_id: please set it to a random id, something like --demoProfileLdap--1234
timestamp: update the timestamp to the current date and time
phoneNumber: enter the phoneNumber of the account that was just created on the demo website. You can find it on the Profile Viewer panel under Identities.
You also need to check and maybe update these fields:
datasetId: you need to copy the Dataset ID for the dataset Demo System - Event Dataset for Call Center (Global v1.1)
imsOrgID: your IMS Org ID is --aepImsOrgId--
The field _id needs to be unique for every data ingestion. If you produce multiple events, please make sure that you update the field _id every time to a new, unique value.
You should then have something like this:
Next, copy your full experience event to your clipboard. The whitespace of your JSON payload needs to be stripped and we'll use an online tool to do that. Go to http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ to do that.
Paste your experience event into the editor and click Remove white space.
Next, select all of the output text and copy it to your clipboard.
Go back to your Terminal window.
Paste the new payload without whitespaces into the Terminal window and click Enter.
Next, go back to your demo website and refresh the page. You should now see an experience event on your profile, under Other Events, just like the one below:
If you want your call center interactions to appear on the Profile Viewer panel, you need to add the below label and filter in your project on https://builder.adobedemo.com/projects, by going to the tab Profile Viewer.
You have finished this exercise.
