Configure Polygraph

Polygraph creates and manages ACE rule sets and generates the reports that contain the records that it deems suspicious. Polygraph includes four screens:

  • Company — Internal information about the company, such as the Cluster ID, Company ID, Medallia Experience Cloud URL, Data retention period, and Data retention enforcement.

  • Reporting — Viewing and running ACE reports.

  • Configuration — Rule setting profile for a specific company.

  • Alarms — Viewing and creating specific email alerts.

Polygraph home screen.

Access Polygraph

After following the steps under Request ACE, log in to the Polygraph instance created for you. Click Select company to choose the company Polygraph is set to. Note you might need to refresh the page to see the information displayed on the screen.

Company

The Company screen displays key information about the company, including these sections:

  • About this company — Internal company information.

  • Recent daily counts — Number of surveys received and analyzed.

  • Users with access — Users that can access the Polygraph instance and grant access to new users. Click Revoke to remove access to Polygraph for a specific user.

Company screen has three different sections: About this company, Recent Daily counts, and Users with access.

Reporting screen

The Reporting screen is where you generate and view previously created Polygraph reports, known as Feedback protection reports. ACE automatically generates a daily file of records based on the Active Configuration on the Configuration screen , which Polygraphs pipes into Medallia Experience Cloud for reports via a flat file in an SFTP folder. To generate the Feedback protection report, ACE processes all surveys from the previous day (the timezone is fixed for the entire ACE cluster).

Additionally, follow these steps to generate other manual reports:

  1. On Since, select the start date of the report. For example, September 1, 2022.

  2. On Until, select the end date of the report. For example, September 2, 2022.

  3. Select the timezone to use in the report. For example, America/Chicago.

  4. On Select a configuration, choose the configuration you want to generate the report from.

  5. Click Generate report.

Restriction: Reports should be run 30 days into the past due to data retention policies. Attempting to report on dates that span beyond the retention period. Both the reported window and the lookback window should not extend into the past beyond the data retention window; otherwise missing past data may cause the report to yield inaccurate results. Note that manually generated reports are not sent to the SFTP location.
Important: Including a very large dataset in the report (either as a result of a date range or a company's very large dataset) may take a long time.

Feedback protection reports in Reporting screen

After the report is generated, navigate to the Recent reports section and, under the Link column, click the URL that corresponds to the recently created report. This downloads a ZIP file that contains a CSV file with several columns ( fields), such as:

  • Survey ID — Survey ID in an Experience Cloud instance.

  • External ID — External survey ID, as shown in the survey URL.

  • First started at — Date and time in UTC when the first page of the survey was responded.

  • Responded at — Date and time in UTC when the survey was completed.

  • Unit identifier — Unit data field.

  • Unit ID — Unit identifier.

  • Score — Sum of all the triggered rules' multiplier.

  • r0001, r0002, ... — Individual score for each rule.

  • Specific ACE fields.

  • Any other Event field to appear in the report.

This image shows an example of a Feedback protection report in a CSV format:

Example of a Feedback protection report.

Configuration screen

The Configuration screen defines the rule setting profile as well as the specific fields for reports. When a new company is onboarded to Polygraph, it creates these configurations:

  • Default — Created by default for every new company. Default configuration settings are not editable.

  • Active — Copies the settings from the Default Configuration and makes them editable. This configuration is used to generate the daily automatic Feedback protection report in Reporting screen.

Configuration screen with rules.

Create Configurations

Besides the Active Configuration, you can create new custom configurations to test different rules settings. For example, if you are getting many false positive flags or cheating is not being properly detected, you can create a new Configuration to check rule settings and run manual reports without affecting the Active Configuration. Once you get the desired results, you can apply the same changes on the Active configuration.

To create a new Configuration:

  1. From the Configuration screen, click New.

  2. Give the configuration a name.
    Restriction: Name can have a minimum of 3 characters and a maximum of 20, and can include letters, numbers, and hyphens (-).

  3. Click OK.

Manage Configurations

To edit a Configuration, make any changes to a rule Multiplier, Threshold, and Version (if applicable), and/or Total Score threshold settings and click Save. To restore previous settings, click Reset. To remove a particular Configuration, click Delete.

Note: After changing a Configuration, there is no automatic re-processing of historical records to apply new rules. To re-process these records:

  • Manually trigger a report that includes the period to be reprocessed.

  • Company retention needs to accommodate that period, plus the Traffic Analysis Window (days) to avoid missing data.

  • Import it into Experience Cloud using the the same Auto Importer.

Rules

Rules define specific conditions for records to be deemed suspicious. Each rule has a relative importance (weight) which is considered when calculating the record's overall suspiciousness score (known as Total score threshold). If the overall score matches or exceeds the Total Score threshold defined for your company, the record is considered suspicious and ACE generates files of records daily. If the Total Score threshold is less than the threshold, the record is not considered suspicious, even if one or more individual rules were violated.

For more information, see Rules.

Rules section in the Configuration screen.

Alarms

The Alarms screen creates specific email alerts connected to ACE. There are two types of alarms:

  • Missing report — Triggers if a report has not been generated by the specified time. You can set multiple alarms of this type, from low to higher criticality.

  • Flagged deviation — Triggers if the number of records flagged is X standard deviations from the 30-day mean.

Note: Polygraph Alarms are completely separated from Alerts.

Alarms screen with two alarms configured.

All automated daily reports for an ACE cluster start being generated at the same time (depending on the cluster's timezone). Reports are generated sequentially, so company reports generated at the end may vary the exact time when they are completed, as they depend on how much time the previous reports took; this can vary on different dates, depending on data volume, seasonality, etc. When configuring a Missing report alarm, make sure:

  • It does not expect the report to be completed before it has started, and give room for variances between different dates.

  • The timezone is reasonably aligned with the cluster's timezone (for example, time zones that are too far apart might be considering the same time as being part of different dates).

Create alarms

Complete these steps to create alarms:

  1. From the Alarms screen, click New item.

  2. From New Alarm configuration:

    1. On Criticality, select the criticality level, which can be Low, Critical, or Warning.

    2. On Type, choose the alarm type, which can be Missing report or Flagged deviation.

    3. On Parameters, define the specific parameters depending on the report type:

      • For Missing report, enter the time and timezone for the report that will be considered missing.

      • For Flagged deviation report, define the Standard deviation counts, which is the number of deviations above which flagged records will trigger this alarm.

    4. On Subscribers, enter the email address of users that will receive the alarms emails and click Subscribe.

  3. Click Save.

    This example shows the configuration for a Missing report type alarm:

    Creating a new Alarm for a Missing report type.

Manage alarms

From the Alarms screen, click Edit icon. edit to modify the alarm settings, or Delete icon delete to delete the alarm.

Alarm emails

Polygraph sends Alarm emails to those addresses entered as Subscribers when configuring the alarm. The following image shows an example of Alarm emails for both report types:

Alarm emails examples.

Important: Alarm emails can only be sent to @medallia.com email addresses.