Foglight Experience Monitor 5.8.1 - Installation and Administration Guide

Filtering data in the Resource List

Use the following procedure to filter the Resource List.

Processing and aggregating URLs

As the appliance encounters URLs in the stream of network traffic, it applies a set of transformations in order to arrive at a final URL. To examine this process a basic understanding of URL structure is necessary.

Consider the following example:

URLs are logically organized into five sections.

The appliance processes each URL by splitting it into these sections, then applies optional transformation rules to each of them. The sections are then recombined, resulting in the final URL that the appliance stores in its database, and displays to users in the web console.

The appliance processes URLs retrieved from monitored network traffic. The extent to which the resultant URL differs from the original URL depends on the transformation rules defined.

For more information, see these topics:

Sending URLs to the Foglight Experience Viewer

If you are using the Foglight Experience Monitor to transmit network traffic to a Foglight Experience Viewer, you can configure Foglight Experience Monitor to apply URL transformations on hits that are transmitted to the Foglight Experience Viewer. (See How Foglight Experience Monitor and Foglight Experience Viewer work together for more information on how Foglight Experience Monitor integrates with Foglight Experience Viewer.)

Normally, when integrated with a Foglight Experience Viewer, the Foglight Experience Monitor is meant to act as a Foglight Experience Viewer’s access point to the network, through which raw data is transferred, then written to a Foglight Experience Viewer’s own database. Analysis can then be performed by a Foglight Experience Viewer users on unaltered data, and is independent of how the Foglight Experience Monitor transforms and records data for its own users.

Although transmitting raw URLs is typically most useful for a Foglight Experience Viewer users, there are situations where sending a transformed URL is preferred. When creating a Variable Rule or Path Rule in the Foglight Experience Monitor, you always have the option of having the rule apply to URLs that are transmitted to Foglight Experience Viewer.

For information about Foglight Experience Viewer discards, see the Server by Port metric in the Foglight Experience Monitor Metric Reference Guide.

For more information on Path Rules, see Defining path rules. For more information on Variable Rules, see Managing variable rules.

Transforming URLs example using variable rules

URLs that appear in monitored network traffic can be transformed into the URLs that appear in the Foglight Experience Monitor database by applying Variable Rules and configuration settings. The following examples explain how to transform URLs.

As parameters, query variable or form variables are added to the appliance, the amount of URLs that appear in the Page and Hit database increases.

In the following example, the parameter variable cat (category) is used to transform the following URL on the appliance: www.mysite.com/travel/mexico.asp;cat. Five different categories are displayed using the cat variable:

If a variable rule is defined for the unique identifier (uid) of a URL, and this variable has an unlimited number of values in the traffic, there will be a continuous growth of URLs that are stored in the Page and Hit databases—this does not provide useful data for the users of the appliance.

Exposing the form variable, action, allows the appliance user to see the performance of submit or search functions of the page on which the variable exists. For example, a URL that is configured to capture and report the overall search performance of our example URL might look like the following URL:

This configuration allows all of the www.mysite.com/travel/mexico.asp URLs with the action of search (action=search) to be examined separately from an action of submit. By displaying parameter values and the form variable you can better understand the pages and the functionality of the web site. The following URLs display in the appliance database along with their own statistics:

It is important to understand the logic regarding how the site was monitored and the depth of detail collected. It is also important to understand that you can significantly affect system performance by exposing a lot of details and thereby more data points can be tracked and correlated.