topic Re: User sessions in Real User Monitoring

How user sessions are processed?

Nissou — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 07:38:09 GMT

Hello,

I'm trying to understand how user sessions are processed. I have done an analysis with 2 months samples and I have a drop of ~50% going from 8700 Feburuary to 5000 March and it's the same for April. I have disabled the "Do Not Track" because I had a lot of Anonymous users showing in Dynatrace and from there the number droped.

Do you have any idea or explanation to this behaviour because we were using this data for our business reviews and now all our calculation where biased and false.

Thank you in advanced.

Re: User sessions

AntonPineiro — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 08:44:47 GMT

Hi,

You can see others entries talking about similar scenarios.

Are you using only CSS selectors for tagging users?

Best regards

Re: User sessions

Nissou — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 08:46:18 GMT

Hi,

Yes, I'm using CSS selectors for user tag.

Best regards

Re: User sessions

AntonPineiro — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 10:37:52 GMT

Hi,

I would try to use other available source types as JavaScript variables, cookies values... As you can read in before link, only using CSS selectors is not going to work in some scenarios.

Best regards

Re: User sessions

tyler_rowe — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 22:03:19 GMT

Hi,

If you are tracking users by the session count itself, tagged users vs anonymous users shouldn't make a difference in terms of ongoing volume, as both types count towards the session count.

A few things could be going on here:

1) A natural decrease in traffic

2) If you are encountering the max number of actions configured in your tenant (https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/platform-modules/digital-experience/web-applications/troubleshooting/what-does-a-max-user-actions-per-minute-exceeded-message-mean), the application may be discarding some traffic

3) Domain unification could cause this. If you have one application where users go through two domains in the same application (eg. example1domain.org and example2domain.org), this would appear as two sessions in Dynatrace despite being the same application, as first party session cookies cannot be placed across two domains. If example2domain was replaced with example1domain, all traffic would appear in one session

4) I would also validate the tag and beacons to ensure not potential issue with those