Session Replay

What is Session Replay?

Session Replay is a tool that allows you to capture and replay the digital experience of every user. With this you can record all interactions on your web application, which helps to identify errors and improve usability.

screen with a circle around showing session replay

Features

There are several uses for Session Replay, which include error drill-down, complaint resolution, and usability analysis.

Error Drill-Down Complaint Resolution Usability Analysis

-  Detect JavaScript errors and other issues

-  Understand the exact user actions that led to an error

-  Understand the severity of the problem and its effect on user experience

-  Observe the customer impact by replaying and viewing a session

-  You don’t need to have all sessions recorded, you can use cost and traffic control to record a subset of sessions

-  The default data retention timeframe is 35 days for these sessions

-  Means to resolve customer complaints

-  See the exact journey of a customer in your application

- Identify the problem faced by the user

-  Provide correct instructions

- It is ideal to have all sessions recorded, but recommended to set a lower retention time for storage space purposes

- The UX design isn’t intuitive enough

- The process flow is too complicated (users tend to leave your application midway)

- The application is slow, and the user clicks repeatedly to move to the next page

- The application doesn’t work as expected on all browsers

- The mobile web app prompts the user to change the orientation of their mobile device, but the user doesn’t understand the prompt

Setup and Configuration

To enable Session Replay, your system must meet the following requirements:

  • Dynatrace version 1.163 (SaaS) or Dynatrace Managed version 1.164
  • OneAgent minimum version 1.169 on all monitored hosts in your environment
  • Real User Monitoring enabled for your application
  • An active Dynatrace Digital Experience Monitoring license
  • Firewalls configured to allow application/octet-stream content coming from your application; some beacons sent by Session Replay are binary
  • Dynatrace Managed deployments only: A secondary disk configured to store user session data
  • The web UI URL has a trusted certificate
  1. Click on Applications & Microservices in the navigation menu
  2. Click on the application you want to configure
  3. Click on Browse[…] > Edit
  4. Under the Application Settings menu, select Session Replay
  5. Turn on Enable Session Replay

You can configure monitoring-consumption and data-privacy settings for Session Replay, with the four possible options:

Cost and traffic control

This will reduce usage while recording user sessions

  1. This modifies the percentage of recorded user sessions to control the volume of data generated by Session Replay
  2. Select Applications & Microservices from the navigation menu
  3. Select the application you want to configure
  4. Select the Browse […] button > Edit
  5. Select Session Replay and behavior > Session Replay
  6. Turn on Enable Session Replay
  7. Enter a percentage value less than 100 in the Analyze % of user sessions field
  8. Select Save

This allows you to decide which parts of a user session must be recorded when recording begins

  1. You can choose to record sessions:
    1. As soon as any user logs in
    2. Only for select customers so that you can offer premium support
    3. Only for certain pages of the application
  2. ​When you enable Session Replay opt-in mode for your web application, recording of the active user session begins only once you invoke the enableSessionReplay() method on the dtrum global object. The dtrum global object is available following the auto-injection of the Real User Monitoring JavaScript tag.
  3. Opt-in mode is disable by default
  4. To enable, select Applications & Microservices from the navigation menu
  5. Select the application you want to configure
  6. Select the Browse […] button > Edit
  7. Select Session Replay and behavior > Session Replay
  8. Turn on Enable Session Replay
  9. Scroll down to the Privacy settings section and turn on Enable the opt-in mode for Session Replay
  10. Select Save


 

URL exclusion

You can configure rules for individual webpages, entire websites, and single-page applications

  1. Under URL exclusion, define a regular expression that matches the page URL in the Regular expression to match an URL field
  2. Select Add rule to add the expression to the URL exclusion rule

Masking

Masking is required to protect confidential user data when recording user interaction

  • Masking settings allow you to protect confidential user data when recording and when playing back sessions
  • Separate masking rules can be specified in order to apply layers of masking controlled by user permissions
  • There are two options for determined what should be masked:
    1. The data-dtrum-mask predefined attribute, which requires a change in the application code
    2. The Session Replay configuration page which allows more of a customized approach
  • Content masking options in the Session Replay configuration page
    • Mask all: (default) masks all text, images, and user input. This is recommended for those who are starting to test Session Replay, and those who want to use Session Replay for troubleshooting applications
    • Mask user input: masks all form inputs, including option items in list boxes and drop-downs. This is recommended for situations where confidential information comes only from user input.
    • Allow list: masks everything in the Mask all option except those elements (defined by the CSS Selector) that match the defined allow-list rules. This is recommended for most applications, as it allows you to collect only the required information.
    • Block list: masks only the elements that are defined in the list, and nothing else. A list with the rules applied to the Mask all option is presented to you. This list can be used to deselect those elements and attributes you want to capture. Additional block list rules can be created.

Useful Links

Dynatrace Docs

FAQ

Page-based applications, single-page applications, and those that use IFrames. Restrictions can be found here: Technical restrictions for Session Replay for web applications | Dynatrace Docs

  • An average session consumes about 500 KB of storage.
  • This is the same case for bandwidth consumption.

  • Data is protected by Masking. You can make masking rules for each session to determine what is protected. These layers of masking are controlled by user permissions.