Documentation AEM as a Cloud Service User Guide

Cloud Service Content Requests

Last update: Tue Feb 13 2024 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Introduction introduction

Cloud Service content requests are measured via server-side collection of data. The collection is enabled via CDN log analysis.

NOTE

Additionally, for a limited number of Early Adopter customers, client-side collection will also be enabled via Real User Monitoring service measurement. You can learn more by consulting the documentation in this article.

Understanding Cloud Service Content Requests understaing-cloud-service-content-requests

Content requests are automatically collected server-side at the edge of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, via automated analysis of the log files originating from the AEM as a Cloud Service CDN. This is done by isolating the requests returning HTML (text/html) or JSON (application /Json) content from the CDN, and based on several inclusion and exclusion rules detailed below. A content request occurs independently from the returned content being served from the CDN caches or the content going back to the origin of the CDN (AEM’s dispatchers).

The Real User Monitoring service , the client-side collection, offers a more precise reflection of user interactions, ensuring a reliable measure of website engagement. This gives customers advanced insights into their page traffic and performance. While this is beneficial for both customers who use either the Adobe managed CDN or a non-Adobe managed CDN. In addition, automatic traffic reporting can now be enabled for customers using a non-Adobe managed CDN, thus removing the need to share any traffic reports with Adobe.

For customers that bring their own CDN on top of AEM as a Cloud Service, server-side reporting will result in numbers that cannot be used to compare with the licensed content requests. These numbers will have to be measured by the customer at the edge of the outer CDN. For these customers, client-side reporting and associated performance, the Adobe RUM Data Service is the Adobe recommended option. See the release notes for the information on how to opt-in.

Server-side Collection serverside-collection

There are rules in place to exclude well-known bots, including well-known services visiting the site regularly to refresh their search index or service.

Variances of Cloud Service Content Requests content-requests-variances

Content Requests can have variances with an organization’s Analytics reporting tools as summarized in the following table. In general, do not use analytics tools that gather data by way of client-side instrumentation to report on the number of content requests for a given site, simply because they often depend on user consent to be triggered, therefore missing out on a significant fraction of the traffic. Analytics tools gathering data server-side in log files, or CDN reports for customers adding their own CDN on top of AEM as a Cloud Service, will provide better counts. For reporting on Page Views and their associated performance, the Adobe RUM Data Service is the Adobe recommended option.

Reason For Variance

Explanation

End user consent

Analytics tools relying on client-side instrumention often depend on user consent to be triggered. This could represent the majority of the traffic not being tracked. For customers who want to measure content requests on their own, it is recommended to rely on analytics tools gathering data server-side or CDN reports.

Tagging

All pages or API calls that are tracked as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) content requests may not be tagged with Analytics tracking.

Tag Management Rules

Tag management rule settings may result in various data collection configurations on a page, resulting in some combination of discrepancies with content request tracking.

Bots

Unknown bots that have not been pre-identified and removed by AEM may cause tracking discrepancies.

Report Suites

Pages that are part of the same AEM instance and domain may send data to different Analytics report suites.

Third-Party Monitoring and Security Tools

Monitoring and security scanning tools may generate content requests for AEM that are not tracked in Analytics reports.

API Access

Programmatic access to pages or to Adobe Experience Manager APIs may generate content requests for AEM that are not tracked in Analytics reports.

Prefetch Requests

Using a prefetch service to pre-load pages to increase speed can cause significant content request traffic increases.

DDOS

While Adobe makes attempts to automatically detect and filter out traffic from DDOS attacks, there is no guarantee that all possible DDOS attacks are detected.

Traffic Blockers

Using a tracker blocker in a browser may opt out some requests from being tracked.

Firewalls

Firewalls may block Analytics tracking. This scenario is more frequent with corporate firewalls.

Types of included content requests included-content-requests

Request Type

Content Request

Description

HTTP Code 100-299

Included

These are regular requests that deliver all or partial content.

HTTP libraries for automation

Included

Examples:
• Amazon CloudFront
• Apache Http Client
• Asynchronous Http Client
• Axios
• Azureus
• Curl
• GitHub Node Fetch
• Guzzle
• Go-http-client
• Headless Chrome
• Java™ Client
• Jersey
• Node Oembed
• okhttp
• Python Requests
• Reactor Netty
• Wget
• WinHTTP

Monitoring and Health Check tools

Included

These are set up by the customer to monitor a certain aspect of the site. For example, availability or real-world user performance. Use /system/probes/health endpoint and not the actual HTML pages from the site.
Examples:
• Amazon-Route53-Health-Check-Service
• EyeMonIT_bot_version_0.1_(https://www.eyemon.it/)
• Investis-Site24x7
• Mozilla/5.0+(compatible; UptimeRobot/2.0; https://uptimerobot.com/)
• ThousandEyes-Dragonfly-x1
• OmtrBot/1.0
• WebMon/2.0.0

<link rel="prefetch"> requests

Included

To increase the speed of loading the next page, customers can have the browser load a set of pages before the user clicks the link—so they are already in the cache. Mind: This is increasing the traffic significantly—depending on how many of these pages are prefetched.

Traffic that blocks Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics reporting

Included

It is more common that visitors of sites have privacy software installed (Ad-blockers, and so on) that impact the accuracy of Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. AEM as a Cloud Service counts requests on the first entry-point into the Adobe operated infrastructure and not the client-side.

Types of excluded content requests excluded-content-request

Request Type

Content Request

Description

HTTP Code 500+

Excluded

Errors returned to the visitor when something goes wrong on AEM as a Cloud Service or the customer custom code.

HTTP Code 400-499

Excluded

Errors returned to the visitor when the content does not exist (404) or there are other content or request-related issues.

HTTP Code 300-399

Excluded

These are good requests that either check if something has changed on the server, or redirect the request to another resource. They do not contain content itself, therefore they are not billable.

Requests going to /libs/*

Excluded

AEM internal JSON requests, such as the CSRF token that is not billable.

Traffic from DDOS attacks

Excluded

DDOS protection. AEM does auto-detect some of the DDOS attacks and blocks them. DDOS attacks if detected are not billable.

AEM as a Cloud Service NewRelic Monitoring

Excluded

AEM as a Cloud Service global monitoring.

URL for customers to monitor their Cloud Service program

Excluded

Recommended URL to externally monitor the availability.

/system/probes/health

AEM as a Cloud Service Pod Warm-up Service

Excluded

User Agent: skyline-service-warmup/1.*

Well-known search engines, social networks, and HTTP libraries (tagged by Fastly)

Excluded

Well-known services visiting the site regularly to refresh their search index or service:

Examples:
• AddSearchBot
• AhrefsBot
• Applebot
• Ask Jeeves Corporate Spider
• Bingbot
• BingPreview
• BLEXBot
• BuiltWith
• Bytespider
• CrawlerKengo
• Facebookexternalhit
• Google AdsBot
• Google AdsBot Mobile
• Googlebot
• Googlebot Mobile
• lmspider
• LucidWorks
• MJ12bot
• Pingdom
• Pinterest
• SemrushBot
• SiteImprove
• StashBot
• StatusCake
• YandexBot

Exclude Commerce Integration Framework calls

Excluded

These are requests made to AEM that get forwarded to the Commerce Integration Framework—the URL starts with /api/graphql—to avoid double counting, they are not billable for Cloud Service.

Exclude manifest.json

Excluded

Manifest is not an API call, it is here to provide information on how to install web sites on desktop or mobile phone. Adobe should not count JSON request to /etc.clientlibs/*/manifest.json

Exclude favicon.ico

Excluded

While the returned content should not be HTML or JSON, we are observing that in some scenarios like SAML authentication flows, favicons can be returned as HTML therefore are explicitly excluded from the count.

Client-side Collection cliendside-collection

Real User Monitoring Service for AEM as a Cloud Service real-user-monitoring-service-for-aem-as-a-cloud-service

INFO

This feature is only available to the early adopter program.
You need to be using AEM Cloud Service version 2023.11.14227 and above in order to enabled the RUM data service.

Overview overview

The Real User Monitoring service is a type of performance monitoring technology that captures and analyzes the digital user experiences of a website or application in real-time. It provides visibility into the real-time performance of a web application and provides accurate insight into the end-user experience.

The Real User Monitoring service provides deep insight into key performance metrics right from the initiation of the URL until the request is served back to the browser all of which helps the developers enhance the application to make it easy to use for the end users.

Who Can Benefit from Real User Monitoring Service? who-can-benefit-from-rum-service

RUM Data Service is beneficial for all customers whether utilising Adobe’s, or their own CDN. It offers a more precise reflection of user interactions, ensuring a reliable measure of website engagement by reflecting the number of Page Views on the client-side.

In particular, for Adobe CDN users, it accurately tracks user interactions for a direct comparison of client-side Page Views with server-side CDN logs.

For customers employing their own CDN they can benefit from simplified traffic reporting, as Adobe now directly integrates these Page Views, eliminating the need for separate reports.

Additionally, all customers gain deep insights into page performance, to optimise their digital experiences effectively.

Understand how the Real User Monitoring Service Works understand-how-the-rum-service-works

Adobe Experience Manager uses Real User Monitoring (RUM) to help customers and Adobe understand, how visitors are interacting with Adobe Experience Manager-powered sites, to diagnose performance issues, and to measure the effectiveness of experiments. RUM preserves the privacy of visitors through sampling - only a small portion of all page views will be monitored - and judicious exclusion of all personally identifiable information (PII).

Real User Monitoring Service and Privacy rum-service-and-privacy

The Real User Monitoring service in Adobe Experience Manager is designed to preserve visitor privacy and minimize data collection. As a visitor, this means that no personal information will be collected by the site you are visiting or made available to Adobe.

As a site operator, this means no additional opt-in is required to enable monitoring through this feature.So, there will be no additional pop up for the end users to accept for enabling RUM monitoring.

Real User Monitoring Service Data Sampling rum-service-data-sampling

Traditional web analytics solutions try to collect data on every single visitor. Adobe Experience Manager’s Real User Monitoring service only captures information from a small fraction of page views. The Real User Monitoring service data is meant to be sampled and anonymized rather than a replacement for analytics. By default, pages will have a 1:100 sampling ratio. Site operators cannot configure this number to increase or decrease the sampling rate as of today. To estimate total traffic accurately,for every 100 page views, we gather detailed data from one, giving you a reliable approximation of overall traffic."

As the decision of whether the data will be collected is made on a page view by page view basis, it becomes virtually impossible to track interactions across multiple pages. RUM has no concept of visits, visitors, or sessions, only of page views. This is by design.

What Data is Being Collected what-data-is-being-collected

The Real User Monitoring service is designed to prevent the collection of personally identifiable information. The full set of information that can be collected by Adobe Experience Manager’s Real User Monitoring service is listed below:

The host name of the site being visited, for example: experienceleague.adobe.com
The broad user agent type that is used to display the page, such as: desktop or mobile
The time of the data collection, such as: 2021-06-26 06:00:02.596000 UTC (in order to preserve privacy, we round all minutes to the previous hour, so that only seconds and milliseconds are tracked)
The URL of the page being visited, for instance: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs
The Referrer URL (the URL of the page that linked to the current page, if the user followed a link)
A randomly generated ID of the page view, in a format similar to: 2Ac6
The weight or inverse of the sampling rate, such as: 100. This means only one in one hundred page views will be recorded
The checkpoint, or name of a particular event in the sequence of loading the page or interacting with it as a visitor
The source, or identifier of the DOM element that the user interacts with for the checkpoint mentioned above. For instance, this could be an image
The target, or link to an external page or resource that the user interacts with for the checkpoint mentioned above. For example: https://blog.adobe.com/jp/publish/2022/06/29/media_162fb947c7219d0537cce36adf22315d64fb86e94.png
The Core Web Vitals (CWV) performance metrics, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) that describe the visitor’s quality of experience.

How to Set Up the Real User Monitoring Service how-to-set-up-the-rum-service

If you wish to be a part of our Early Adopter program, please send an email to aemcs-rum-adopter@adobe.com, along with your domain name for the production, stage and dev environment from your email address associated with your Adobe ID. Adobe’s product team will then enable the Real User Monitoring (RUM) Data Service for you.
Once this is completed, Adobe’s product team will create a Customer collaboration Channel.
Adobe’s Product team will reach out to you to provide you with the domain key and data dashboard URL where you can view the Page Views and The Core Web Vitals(CWV) metrics collected by the client-side Real User Monitoring service collection.
You will then be guided on how to use the domain key to access the data dashboard url and view the metrics.

How Real User Monitoring Service Data is Being Used how-rum-service-data-is-being-used

RUM data is beneficial for the following purposes:

To identify and fix performance bottlenecks for customer sites
Streamlined, automatic traffic reporting that includes Page Views for customers using their own CDN, which means they do not have to share any traffic report with Adobe.
To understand how Adobe Experience Manager interacts with other scripts (such as analytics, targeting, or external libraries) on the same page, in order to increase compatibility.

Limitations and Understanding Variance in Page Views and Performance Metrics limitations-and-understanding-variance-in-page-views-and-performance-metrics

As you will analyze this data, there might or might not be variances in page views and other performance metrics reported by Real User Monitoring (RUM). These variances can be attributed to several factors inherent in real-time, client-side monitoring. Here are key considerations for customers to keep in mind when interpreting their RUM data:

Tracker blockers
- End-users employing tracker blockers or privacy extensions can impede Real User Monitoring service’s data collection, as these tools restrict the tracking scripts’ execution. This restriction can lead to underreported page views and user interactions, creating a discrepancy between actual site activity and the data captured by RUM.
Limitations in capturing API/JSON calls
- RUM data service focuses on the client-side experience and doesn’t capture the backend API or JSON calls at this time. The exclusion of these calls from Real User Monitoring service data will create variances from the content requests measured by CDN Analytics.

FAQ faq

How can I configure paths to include or exclude in monitoring?

Customers will be able to configure paths to include or exclude the URLs for monitoring by setting the Environment variables within the configuration in Cloud Manager by using these variables: AEM_WEBVITALS_EXCLUDE and AEM_WEBVITALS_INCLUDE_PATHS

Please note that by default, the ‘include’ setting is configured to target ‘/content’. It’s important to remember that the paths you need to configure here are content paths within the system, not the URL paths you see in your browser. This distinction is key for accurately setting up and customizing your configuration to meet your specific needs.
Would Adobe be able to track all the page views before the interaction reaches the customer managed CDN or at the point when the interaction reaches the customer managed CDN?

Yes.
Will customers be able to integrate the RUM data service scripts with third-party systems like Dynatrace?

Yes.
Are “Interaction to next paint”, “Time to first byte” and “First contentful paint” Web vitals Metrics being collected?

Interaction to next paint (INP) and Time to first byte (TTFB) are collected. First contentful paint is not collected at this time.

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