Getting started

Arena installs into your own AWS account as one CloudFormation stack. From subscribing to agents seeing points takes about an hour, most of it waiting for AWS to build the stack.

Before you start

You need:

• An Amazon Connect instance, and an AWS account with permission to create CloudFormation stacks, IAM roles, DynamoDB tables, Lambda functions and a CloudFront distribution.
• A routing profile per team. Arena uses the routing profile name as the team name.
• Optional, for quality scoring: Contact Lens evaluations and conversational analytics switched on, with their S3 buckets to hand.

1. Subscribe and launch

1. On the Arena listing in AWS Marketplace, choose View purchase options, then Subscribe.
2. Choose Set up your account. Marketplace brings you to the Arena registration page, which confirms your subscription and shows a Launch Arena in CloudFormation button.
3. The launch page opens in your AWS console with the template and your subscription prefilled. Review the settings. The ones most people change are the alarm email, the evaluation and analysis buckets, and the wallboard name style. Every setting is explained in the settings reference.
4. Tick all three acknowledgement boxes at the bottom of the page: IAM resources, IAM resources with custom names, and the CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND capability. The console only shows a small "Please acknowledge all checkboxes" notice if one is missed and the button does nothing. Then choose Create stack. Expect about ten minutes, most of it CloudFront.

When the stack shows CREATE_COMPLETE, open its Outputs tab. You will use StreamArn, SiteUrl and UserPoolId.

Staying current

When a newer version exists, the supervisor console shows a notice at the top with what changed and a link here. Updating is one CloudFormation stack update to the new template URL from the release notes; settings and data stay. To hear about versions without opening the console, subscribe to the release feed or the email list on the release notes page.

2. Point Connect at Arena

Arena reads the agent event stream. In the Amazon Connect console:

1. Open your instance, then Data streaming.
2. Under Agent events, choose the Kinesis stream named in the StreamArn output.
3. Save.

Optional, and recommended: set ConnectInstanceArn on the stack (the instance's ARN from the Connect console) and leave BackfillDays at 90. Within the hour the stack lists your users so every agent appears in the console, and loads the last 90 days of contacts and evaluations per agent from Connect's own metrics, so leaderboards, the results report and personal bests have history on day one. Backfilled days show as "History" lines in an agent's feed and never count toward billing.

Optional, for survey scores: under Contact records, choose the same stream, and set the CsatAttribute setting on the stack to the contact attribute your survey writes. See customer sentiment and survey scores.

3. Put the panel in the agent workspace

1. In the Connect console, open Third-party applications and add an application with the URL <SiteUrl>/agent-panel.html.
2. In Security profiles, grant Access to that application for your agents' profiles.

Agents see an Arena tab in their workspace.

4. Create sign-ins

Arena has its own sign-in so that the API never trusts a browser's word about who is asking. The stack creates a user pool with two groups, supervisors and agents. Create the users from your Connect directory with the sync script from the deployment package:

node lambda/sync-users.js <stack name> --instance <connect instance id> --dry-run
node lambda/sync-users.js <stack name> --instance <connect instance id>

Users whose Connect security profile name contains "supervisor" or "admin" become supervisors. Everyone else is an agent, tied to their Connect agent and routing profile. To use your own identity provider instead, see users and sign-in.

5. Open the pages

• Agents: the Arena tab in the workspace, or <SiteUrl>/agent-panel.html.
• Supervisors: <SiteUrl>/supervisor-console.html.
• Results report: <SiteUrl>/report.html.
• Wallboard: created from the console with TV link. See wallboards.

The first contact an agent handles after the stream is connected appears in their panel within seconds. If nothing appears, see troubleshooting.

Current as of version 0.17.0. See the release notes for what changed since.