Best ways to monitor & catch tracking/traffic problems?

mikky-cecil · May 21, 2020, 11:31pm

We’ve had a couple of incidents lately where something went wrong in our tracking process and we didn’t notice the drop in traffic until we’d already lost days or weeks of data. We’re revising our monitoring process to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and part of that is to see if there’s a way to track/monitor “tracking failures” better. Maybe there are some Matomo features/configuration that could help? Any articles on monitoring things and catching problems?

I’d also like to know, more specifically, if there’s any way to get some kind of notification if any of these things happen:

Tracking info is sent to a site ID that does exist in Matomo. The site configured to only accept tracking info from a list of domains. This request came from a domain not on that list, so it was ignored.
A site starts getting an unusually low number of views. ex. site normally gets 200+ views a day, then one day it gets 0 views.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Lukas · May 22, 2020, 8:49am

Hi,

You can set this up using the CustomAlerts plugin: https://plugins.matomo.org/CustomAlerts

In theory this feature already exists and Matomo sends notifications if tracking requests are sent to the wrong site ID. I am just not sure if this only works if the wrong siteID is one that does not exist.

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Report tracking into wrong Site ID and missing token auth

matomo-org:3.x-dev ← matomo-org:12922

opened 02:09AM - 28 Sep 18 UTC

tsteur

+2015 -140

fix #12922 * When a tracking request is invalid for any of the 2 reasons, we …log the request as a failure * Any failed request older than 2 days ago is automatically deleted again * Weekly we check for tracking failures and email super users only (doing this for admins is bit tricky) * Admins and SuperUsers see a new widget on Admin Home screen plus it can be used in the dashboard: ![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/273120/46183978-970aac00-c327-11e8-9eea-1a1684367270.png) * New diagnostics page that shows tracking failures in depth ![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/273120/46184024-c15c6980-c327-11e8-8889-5f1a1f2f1185.png) I was also thinking about showing a box in the reporting toolbar, eg on the right... but then thought it may not be needed for now and might be rather annoying. May be good to first see how many false reports maybe come in etc. I reckon it is a good working solution v1 for this tool and see from there how/where it goes. Heaps could be done there. Todo: We should write FAQ articles for those 2 particular errors and adjust the links in the code

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Report tracking into wrong Site ID

opened 08:58PM - 16 May 18 UTC

closed 05:44AM - 06 Dec 18 UTC

tsteur

Enhancement

We often see users tracking traffic into no longer existing siteIds or siteIds t…hat never existed. In https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/7550 we already have an issue to report back tracking errors. As this is quite a big project, I think it would be valuable to start with some more simple use case. When a site is being tracked into a website that doesn't exist anymore (we could have the highest siteId as option and check if `$trackedSiteId < $highestSiteId`). If so, we could report this in some way to the super user (as the site no longer exist it cannot be reported to any admin or view user). FYI: I wouldn't show it for `$trackedSiteId > $highestSiteId` as you could send lots of random requests to users every day annoying them by getting notifications about wrong requests and bloating tracker cache etc. The question is where to store this info efficiently and where to show it. Regarding storing: We could store it in a simple table or option table or something. To minimize DB requests during tracking we would have in cache `highestSiteId` and all currently wrong tracked siteIds. This way we hit the DB only once per site. We would maybe reset the list of "wrong tracked siteIds" daily or weekly. It would be also good to store along this info at what time we received the first wrong tracking request for that site and on which URL. Regarding showing the notice: Not sure. Maybe weekly we could send a summary mail if there is one or multiple siteIds still in use? In the admin we could maybe have a screen for this under diagnostics and maybe a notification if data is tracked into a wrong siteId?

mikky-cecil · May 29, 2020, 5:37am

Wow, the Custom Alerts plugin looks like exactly what we need, thanks so much for suggesting it!

In theory this feature already exists and Matomo sends notifications if tracking requests are sent to the wrong site ID. I am just not sure if this only works if the wrong siteID is one that does not exist.

Hm, we had some tracking going to the wrong site ID (one that did exist but the URL didn’t match) for a few weeks and it never popped up in tracking errors. Now that I’m thinking about it, this could have been due to having the “ignore tracking requests from other URLs” setting turned on. From what I saw in the code, it seemed like that setting could stop things pretty early. Kinda wish that showed up as a tracking error too?

Thanks again for your suggestions and other insights. Always super helpful! (You showed me the “replay tracking” feature a little while ago; even though it didn’t help in that situation, it gave us another “backup” route which did come in handy a bit later!)