Automatic user-action naming based on page metadata

Dynatrace automatically generates user action names based on either underlying HTML page file names (for example, Loading of page index.html)  or XHR URLs (for example, http://example.com/api/login). An earlier article explains your options for automated user action naming and explores how you can configure the default naming of user actions. This article focuses on recent enhancements to user-action naming and extraction rules.

To add a new user action naming rule

1. From the navigation menu, select Applications.
2. Select the application you want to configure.
3. Click the Browse (…) button.
4. Select Edit.
5. Select the User actions tab.
6. Click the Add naming rule button.
   Basic user action naming rules are static. Extraction rules are used for dynamic user action naming. For full details about user action naming rules, see How do I create custom names for user actions?
   
   

User action names based on page metadata

With the latest release of Dynatrace, you can now configure user action naming rules based on page metadata. Dynatrace supports three metadata elements for user action naming: CSS selector, JavaScript variable, and meta tag. To define a user action naming rule, type a Resulting user action name and select a metadata type from the Rule drop list.

In many cases, the available page metadata already contains usable action names that you can build extraction rules for. For example, consider a JavaScript variable that has been implemented for monitoring with Dynatrace Advanced Synthetic that contains a page group ID (for example, gomez.pgId). You can configure an extraction rule that uses the value of the page group ID as the user action name. See example below.

As you can see, user action naming rules provide a powerful and flexible means of generating consistent and readable user action names.