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Solarwinds and Google Analytics

dragoon231 over 6 years ago

Hello all,

Pardon the lack of terminology as I am more of an NPM and SAM with 0 experience with anything web related. I received an email roughly summarized/stating the following:

Our company has many sites that run Google Analytics. There is a problem in which the company is unable to use WPM to monitor these sites because 'solarwinds' (i'm guessing they mean Orion WPM) shows up as a real user in GA (Google Analytics) and throws visit counts way off. The company wants to use WPM for current sites and others that eventually are spun up so they do not have to use multiple monitors. The suspicion is the user agent header SolarWinds uses matches that of a legitimate browser which is causing problems. Other monitors such as Pingdom and NewRelic do not have this issue.

Is there an easy fix to this issue? I'm not a web person, so I honestly don't know what any of this really means. Thank you for taking the time to read this!

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0 jiri.tomek over 6 years ago
Hello,
changing User Agent string is not directly supported by WPM. I opened a feature requests WPM-163 for that internally.
However WPM is using Internet Explorer so it uses the same UA string as IE does. And it is possible to change UA string for IE on given machine. So if it's acceptable for you to change UA string for whole server where WPM player is installed you can achieve what you need.
You can append custom values to UA string by adding custom values to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform
. If you add for example string value with name "WPM Player" and empty data your UA string may look like:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; Tablet PC 2.0; WPM Player)
You need to do that on all WPM player machines. Your web team then needs to exclude visits containing "WPM Player" from Google Analytics results.
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0 dragoon231 over 6 years ago in reply to jiri.tomek

You are my hero! Thank you very much!
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0 fweichelt over 6 years ago in reply to jiri.tomek

We are looking to exclude the transactions on our front end web pages called by the transaction players in their respective locations. recommended customizing the UA string, but that would entail a tremendous amount of manual labor on our end not to mention it will exclude the entire machine from the analytics pulled by tealeaf and piwik. Is there any other solutions to excluding those web transactions from analytics software such as IBM's Tealeaf or Piwik? And if not, is there a more universal way of updating/customizing the UA string on each player/location without having to do each one individually manually?
Our transactions have become unmanaged until we find a solution, but we need this valuable data back up and available as soon as possible so any timely solution you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
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0 jiri.tomek over 6 years ago in reply to fweichelt

Hello Franklin,
why is it a problem to exclude whole machine? Do you have WPM players installed for example on workstations where other users are accessing those websites and you need to track those? I'm asking to better understand your scenario.
Regarding manual work to update the UA strings - you can use Group Policy to update the registry on machines in domain with just a few clicks. Is that an option for you?
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0 Dorrikano323 over 3 years ago in reply to dragoon231

thanks
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