Connect your sites to Insight

In this article, you learn how to connect your Sitefinity CMS sites to Sitefinity Insight data centers.
The following chart summarizes the relationship and information flow between Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight. Because information in Sitefinity Insight is always stored and processed in a particular data center, you need organize the relationship between your Sitefinity CMS sites, Sitefinity Insight data centers, and, if any, third-party systems. You have the flexibility to store and organize your marketing data as required. For example, in a single Sitefinity data center, you can combine data from your Sitefinity CMS site and mobile apps or combine data from your sites and third-party marketing automation system. For more information, see Data integration and data imports.

RECOMMENDATION: We recommend connecting each Sitefinity CMS instance separately to a specific data center in Sitefinity Insight. If you are working in multisite mode, you can choose a specific data center to track each of the sites. This enables you to track the sites separately.

PREREQUISITES: Your Sitefinity Insight user account needs to have access to all data centers and permissions to manage data centers within the account to establish a connection and generate access keys.

To secure the connection between Sitefinity CMS and data centers, Sitefinity Insight uses access keys as an authentication mechanism. Each access key is a JSON Web token, which uniquely identifies each connection to Sitefinity CMS, or any specific site or instance. An access key expires only after you deactivate it manually.

IMPORTANT: The format of the access keys has changed since Jan 22, 2020. The new format includes information about the Sitefinity Insight data center that the access keys authorize. With Sitefinity CMS 13.0 release, you use only the new format of the keys to connect to the European, the USA, or Canada data centers, without performing additional configuration in Sitefinity CMS.

Generate access keys

Access keys are generated in the Sitefinity Insight Administration dashboard, and upon configuring your Insight connector in Sitefinity CMS, you use them to establish the connection.

To generate an access key:

1. Open the Insight Administration dashboard and click Access keys.
2. Click Generate access key.
3. Enter a name that will help you identify the key in the list with other keys, for example, Product site.
4. Define the level of access this key will grant upon connection to Sitefinity CMS:
   • All data centers
     This connection has access to all existing and newly created data centers, that is, all sites within this Sitefinity CMS instance.
   • Selected data centers
     The connection gives a selected list of data centers to track.

     NOTE: You can later modify the permissions. When creating a new data center, make sure to modify the list with selected data centers accordingly to grant access to the new data center.

5. Click Generate.
6. Copy the generated key.

   IMPORTANT: After you close the window, you will not be able to see this key again. Make sure you have a copy of the key in a secure place.

Manage access keys

Navigate to the Administration dashboard » Access keys to see a list of all generated keys, as well as details about the access they grant and when were the keys generated.

By clicking on the cog icon, you can also:

• Deactivate key
  Connection to Sitefinity CMS is lost and your sites will no longer be tracked.
• Change access
  Change the level of permission for this connection.

You can also sort the key list to display either all activated or deactivated keys.

NOTE: When you are creating new data centers, do not forget to update the access key permissions so that access is granted to the newly created data centers. If you already granted access to all data centers, you do not have to change anything.

You can now use this key to connect Sitefinity CMS to Sitefinity Insight. For more information, see Connect to Sitefinity Insight.

IMPORTANT: Depending on your Sitefinity CMS version, you use the access key in a slightly different way:

• Sitefinity CMS 12.1 and later
  In Access key field, paste the access key.
• Sitefinity 12.0 and older
  In Username/Email field, enter AccessKey
  In Password field, paste the access key.