RUM Session Capture by User Type

[scardignos]

Hi Everyone,

I'm reaching out to see if any teams have encountered and solved a challenge we're facing with RUM session capture.

The Problem:

Due to the cost of RUM sessions, we've had to reduce our capture rate on all frontend applications. However, we currently have no way to selectively capture only the sessions we're most interested in analyzing.

Specifically, we'd like to capture client sessions while excluding QA and Robot sessions. This would allow us to maximize the value of our session budget by focusing on actual user behavior.

Has anyone found a way to filter session capture by persona or user type?

Any insights or solutions you can share would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help.

[andre_vdveen]

Hi @scardignos 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but you are able to exclude capturing of RUM user sessions based on IP addresses and also exclude bots/crawlers for web applications.
https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/shortlink/rum-exclude-bots

If this is not what your question is about, please elaborate 🙂

PS: I'm not sure why your post ended up with a 'community issue' label, or in the 'Ask moderators' section, so I'm moving it to the Ask -> Real User Monitoring section and adding the correct labels re: the topic.

HTH,
André

[scardignos]

Let me try again.  We have “cost and traffic control” set to a 60% for an application that generates millions of sessions per day.   To better assess the client experience and make the best use of captures, we want to exclude sessions generated by certain application roles (e.g., admins or managers).   These sessions can originate from many different geolocations, so maintaining an IP-exclude list would not be feasible.  Does that help?

[andre_vdveen]

Unfortunately, it is not possible to control cost/traffic based on what you're looking for. The only options available, are listed in the documentation page I linked to.

[rbender]

I don't believe there is a way to conditionally enable/disable RUM on the Dynatrace admin side (e.g. settings in the RUM application), but this should be accomplishable with application logic. Instead of enabling all sessions, your application would programmatically enable/disable for specific user groups. I believe you would set opt-in mode to enabled (meaning nothing is captured by default), and then conditionally enable() the desired users.

You could then add additional session metadata for persona/user type, which might accomplish your other question of advanced filtering.

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/shortlink/api-rum

Hope that helps!