End-user experience session, page, and object-type detection

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring Software Edition captures traffic, assembles it into requests for objects, pages, and user sessions, and records the performance metrics that indicate the success (or failure) of these transactions.

Since Web protocols have no direct concept of pages and sessions, Real End User Experience Monitoring must use clues and rules to reassemble several objects into a page, and string pages into user sessions. To perform these functions, the system looks at page composition and tries to identify sessions, users, timeouts, and departures.

Sessions

A session is an identifiable period of interaction, between a web user and one or more pages, whose duration is measured from the starting point of the interaction until either a certain amount of time has passed since the user's last request or the user positively terminates the session (for example, via a logout action).

To identify a session, most applications insert a unique string into the communication with a visitor. This identification is usually done with a cookie, which keeps track of the user's interaction and associates requests with shopping carts and accounts. The system can monitor cookies, keeping track of a user’s session.

Users do not tell the system when they have left a site, so the system must wait for a certain amount of inactivity before it can declare a session terminated. Similarly, for slow pages, the system might force the ending of a page rather than wait for the remaining components to be delivered.

For more information, see Configuring session detection and viewing sessionization status.

Pages

In web-based applications, the user's browser software sends HTTP requests to a web server. The web server responds with the pages, images, and other documents the browser requested. Each request and its corresponding response contain a great deal of information. Together, the result of these individual requests is a web page.

A page is a set of objects consisting of the container object (for example, *.asp and *.jsp) and its subordinate frames and objects. The reference URL of the subordinate frames and objects is that of the container object.

For more information, see Configuring page detection.

Objects

Some objects (index.html, for example) are containers that encompass a page's content and layout. Other objects (image.gif, style.css, and script.js, for example) are components that are part of a page. Finally, some objects (document.pdf and file.zip, for example) stand alone. These objects are neither containers nor components.

For more information, see Configuring object-type detection