Record infrastructure and behaviour of application users

Inventory of user, infrastructure, GEO location and activity information on the user's end device

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What is an 'Application User Inventory'?

The Application User Inventory (AUI) enables information about infrastructure, page content and the geographical location of customer-specific and browser-based applications to be collected and processed. This information helps application managers, software developers and IT operations to improve the functional or technical orientation of their product in a customer-oriented manner.

This blog post attempts to clarify the difference between these two aspects using the data used for inventory and monitoring.

The following information may be collected:

Benutzertyp

Es wird automatisiert erkannt, ob es sich bei dem Benutzer der Web-Anwendung um einen menschlichen Benutzer, ein synthetisches Monitoring oder um einen Bot (Crawler, Spider) handelt.

Standort

IP-Adresse
Geografischer Standort (Koordinaten, Land, Region, Stadt etc.)

Infrastruktur

Hardware (Bildschirmauflösung etc.)
Betriebs (Typ, Name, Version)
Browser (Hersteller, Version, Cookie Status)
Netzwerkanbieter

Seiteninhalte

URL im Browser
Kundenspezifische HTML-Elemente per CSS-Selektor (z. B. Benutzername, Überschrift etc.)

How does the Application User Inventory work?

To set up the Application User Inventory (AUI), create a corresponding AUI configuration in the customer-specific Versio.io environment. Based on the AUI configuration, an individual script tag is generated, which is integrated into the HTML page of the web application.

When the page injected with the AUI script tag is loaded by a user, the script collects the inventory data from the user's device and sends it to OneImporter. OneImporter processes the sent data according to the customer-specific configuration and enriches it if necessary. OneImporter then stores the data in the Versio.io environment. If the configuration is changed, the script in the HTML page does not need to be updated.

How does the Application User Inventory work?

Illustration: How the Application User Inventory works

What information does the Application User Inventory provide?

With the Application User Inventory, all users of the web application can be recorded in separate categories: real users, bots and synthetic monitoring.

The following image shows an overview of how the information collected about users of the web application is displayed. Filters in the form of a full-text search and topologies are available to make the large amount of collected data manageable.

The following figure shows the data collected from a user after they have accessed the web application once.

What information does the Application User Inventory
provide?

Figure: Versio.io Instance History Viewer displays collected information about a user

When a user performs actions in the web application, these can be tracked in the Versio.io environment in terms of time and content. In Versio.io, we refer to this as historisation. The following illustration shows how Versio.io displays the recorded change in screen resolution.

Here you can see that the user performed two actions in the web application with different screen resolutions. It appears that the user is working with two screens and moved the browser to a second screen with a different resolution between the actions.

Figure: Versio.io environment Instance History Viewer shows the different actions of a user

Another example shows that the user has accessed various pages. In this case, the browser URL has changed and the first heading from the page content has also been captured.

Figure: Versio.io environment Instance History Viewer shows the change in the browser URL and the selected heading.

The following data report shows examples of how the data from the Application User Inventory can be evaluated.

Figure: Versio.io Application User Inventory Data Analysis of the selected user category Real User and selected information

Conclusion

The Application User Inventory provides you with detailed information about user types, actions, infrastructure and geo-location of the end devices of application users.

The Application User Inventory can be easily integrated into a web application using a simple configuration and is therefore technically straightforward to implement.

Based on the Application User Inventory data, customers have information at their disposal to optimise their web application in terms of content, technology and operation.

Author | January 2022

Felix Tantsch

Software Developer

P: +49-30-221986-51

M: felix.tantsch@versio.io