Hello everyone, we have Matomo running on a dev instance.
We have created a segment for our developers, who all work on localhost:4200 and have also deployed the container there. In addition, the developers work via VPN and therefore all have the same location.
Now it seems that the sessions of the different developers are being thrown together.
Hence the question: Is the session recognised in the first place via fingerprinting (client, location, etc.) and in the second place via the visitor ID? How is it possible that the sessions of similar users are lumped together?
@zepply : Hi,
I haven’t taken a detailed look at the code, but I know from my own experience that it’s initially a question of whether Matomo can recognize the visitor based on a Matomo cookie or not.
If you use cookieless tracking or no cookie is sent by the visitor, then the fingerprint is used.
In corporate networks, it’s quite possible that visitor profiles cannot be distinguished if the client IP (which arrives at the Matomo server) and the browser properties are the same.
This might be of interest to you:
I have to check the setup to be sure about the impact of proxies.
However, I still don’t quite understand why the sessions are thrown together. Because we have checked the sessions in the live visitor log. The pages of my devs session were to be found in another users session although he had a Matomo Cookie. This would mean that recognition via a cookie value would actually be considered fulfilled, wouldn’t it?
This visitor cookie though had a different value then the one visitor ID we could see in the visitor log.
Because of this quick test, I have assumed that the cookie or the value in the cookie is not taken as the first instance for differentiation but the fingerprinting method. And that there are sufficient similarities while using fingerprinting between the users so that the sessions are thrown together.
How is that possible if the cookie value would be the initial indicator for matomo to differentiate the user?
Did your user have a Matomo cookie before you accessed the site? It didn’t sound like it.
That means your user’s fingerprint is probably the same as that of the other user who has a cookie.
What about your IP address that arrives in Matomo and is used? Is it perhaps too anonymized?
Do you also use the same browser?
Have you checked this?
Here’s Matomo’s explanation of how the fingerprint (called config_id) is determined:
Please note this sentence:
the IP address used to create the config_id will be the anonymised IP address when you have enabled IP anonymisation which is the default privacy setting in Matomo (when you select “Also use anonymised IP when enriching visit: No” then the full IP address will be used in the hash calculation).
