We are trying to use Foglight Experience Monitor (FxM) to expose as much data as possible from the http headers into the URLs that FxM displays. So we ran auto-discovery for 'http variables' and added all the variables that showed up into our configuration as Variable Rules. As soon as we did that, we stopped getting any further sessions in the user session log.
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Likely you have flooded the FxM database with this configuration change. Depending on which variables you exposed into the URL, this could exponentially explode the number of URLs FxM is tracking.
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To get the system cleaned up:
1. Go to the command line Console Program
For versions of FxM previous to 5.5.4:
2. escape back to the linux shell (6 - z - shell)
3. run the command:
cleardatacache
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For versions of FxM which are 5.5.4 or later:
2. Navigate into menu by 6 -> 8 -> 3 ( Clear Datastore)
It's generally not a good idea to expose any variable (not just HTTP variables) that are frequently changing. The system wasn't designed for this.
In particular, watch out for variables that are unique to every user (such as login names or session identifiers). These should NOT be configured in Variable Rules under any circumstances.
FxM is for performance metrics. You are trying to extract content analysis information from FxM but that is what Foglight Experience Viewer (FxV) is for. FxM isn't intended for content analysis, it is intended for performance analysis.
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Definition of 'HTTP Variable' - These are values that appear in the HTTP headers and contain information about the client, server and the web page. Some applications can create custom HTTP headers that contain useful state information relevant to the application itself. In these cases, you can configure these HTTP variables and expose their values in the user interface.
Some of those HTTP headers are available as fields in the User Session. FxV shows you all of them. It's generally not a good idea to enable common HTTP variables because that's going to distort your metric data by creating URLs you don't want. The feature is there so you can expose an HTTP variable if it contains some sort of state information that is important to your application.
You can overload the system with a Variable Rule of any type (query, form, http, etc.), not just 'http'. What happens when you create a Variable Rule and select "Show As is" in the "Value" section is that the system will create new URLs exposing that value. That will "blow up" the number of URLs, depending on how many variants of that URL are exposed.
Example, before adding the http variable rule, FxM shows:
abc.com/home.asp
After adding 'User-Agent' as a HTTP variable rule, FxM shows:
abc.com/home.asp?User-Agent=Mozilla4
abc.com/home.asp?User-Agent=Mozilla5
abc.com/home.asp?User-Agent=IE7
etc. etc.
You are safe configuring a variable on the 'Configure' | 'Monitoring' | 'User Sessions' web console page so that FxM knows how to identify unique user sessions. (i.e. its just being used as a way to group the URLs but doesn't change the URLs). But you are not safe adding it as a variable rule which that unique user session identifier gets appended to every URL, creating lots more URL combinations.
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