Tracking user action source

[Julius_Loman]

Does anyone track the source of user actions in a web application? The idea is to track and evaluate which navigation methods in the web applications the users are preferring.

Let me give an example of the Dynatrace UI itself. For a list of applications, you can navigate either by clicking on the breadcrumb (1) or using the left menu (2). The user action itself is the same (e.g. "Application list"). I don't want to split the user action into several ones.

Ideally, the source of the action is tracked in a user action property. However, at the moment there is no possibility to have the element identifier of the interaction or data-dtname (or any alternative) as the source of the user action property. 
Another option is to send the user action property source by calling dtrum API, but this can be challenging from the implementation side.

What is your experience?

[AntonioSousa]

I have had the need in the past, but wasn't able to get there with a standard approximation. First we tried the Referer header, bit it was not reliable, and it wouldn't solve your usecase anyway.

We then tried with Javascript, and since in our case we had the possibility of passing a parameter, we then started catching it as a parameter with Dynatrace. But this was done without the Javascript API...

[Julius_Loman]

The referrer value is also not possible in general. It's effective in case if you need to track the landing. I have a use case where you can get to the same user action on the application home page by using different links (menu and list of favourites for example).

[dannemca]

I was about to suggest the Referrer as property 🤔 . Why you face this as not reliable?

[AntonioSousa]

There are multiple situations where the Referer is not sent. In the case I had, the page was only accessible from another one, so first thing I did was capture Referer server side, as a Request Attribute. I don't recall the details, but we only got a little part of the total requests. I checked the Wikipage now for such situations, and probably I was affected by CSP then. But not sure... 

Also, as Julius has stated, it you got two links on a page, Referer won't help to distinguish them.

[uros_djukic1]

Hello,
I confirm the fact that if you are running your platform onto Managed there are some potential CSP strike AFAIK. Indeed all depend  about "route change" or some webhook, thus not ease to use referer. 
The easy solution is using self-monitoring dashboard feature. Namely, self-monitoring of Dynatrace Managed clusters on dedicated SaaS environments for Premium customers only.

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

I've put together a product idea on this topic too.