User tags for session analysis now support server-side request attributes (Preview)

Optimum user experience requires that you understand the journeys of all your application users across multiple web properties.

To group sessions based on individual users across entities and sessions, Dynatrace enables you to tag individual sessions that are captured with Dynatrace Real User Monitoring. This serves as an additional mechanism Dynatrace provides for applying user tags:

• CSS selectors
• Meta-tag capture
• JavaScript variables
• JavaScript tag API calls
• (New) Server-side request attributes

Dynatrace already allows you to access the frontend information that you may need, but sometimes the data needed to tag sessions only resides on the server side and isn’t exposed to the frontend. Specifically, SSO solutions often hold such information without exposing it to the frontend. Now, as long as you have OneAgents deployed on your backend system, you can access the required tag information via server-side request attributes.

Sign up for the Preview

If you’re already leveraging Dynatrace Real User Monitoring and have Dynatrace OneAgents deployed on your backend systems, you can join the Preview to take advantage of this great new benefit of the Dynatrace full-stack monitoring solution. To join the program, your Dynatrace SaaS environment must be updated to version 1.161 (or version 1.162 for Dynatrace Managed environments).

Setup

You may have already defined one or more request-attribute capture rules. If not, to learn how to configure request attributes, have a look at our Request attributes: Simplify request searches & filtering blog post.

Once you have a request attribute configured, open up the settings for your application (Application settings > User tag) and click the Add tag (identifier) rule button.

Next, from the Expression type to capture drop list, select Server-side request attribute and the Request attribute name of the request attribute you want Dynatrace to use for user tagging.

Please keep in mind that certain service request attributes won’t be captured for each user action/user session as all corresponding server-side PurePaths may not be captured due to adaptive capture control.

If you join this Preview, this data-capture option will also be available in your environment for these upcoming capabilities:

• Definition of user session properties (Release target: Dynatrace version 1.164)
• Definition of user action properties (Release target: Q2 2019)