Auto-grouping Pages

This section covers the auto-grouping pages feature in Browser Real User Monitoring. With Browser Real User Monitoring, the strategy is to use the path of a URL as a unique ID for each page group, which consolidates metric data into a manageable number of page groups. A page group refers to a set of unique URLs that are grouped together for the purpose of monitoring.

Auto-grouping pages leverages the ID de-duplication, which works on a single URL and doesn't require knowledge of any other URLs. Currently, there are two approaches to ID de-duplication, which includes Universal Unique Identifier (UUID) detection and custom ID detection. 

Universal Unique Identifier Detection

Universal Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) are hexadecimal strings in the format of xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx where each x represents four bits. This UUID is unique, which makes it easier to detect in URLs.

In RESTful backends UUIDs are commonly used as the IDs of the resources identified by the URL. Therefore, it's common to encounter UUIDs in URLs.

Custom ID Detection

Many websites and backends use other ID formats such as IDs with numeric values. If a path segment's characters consist of more than 33% numbers then it is considered an ID. 

This algorithm picks up a wide range of path segments, which can include:  

• Integer and floating point numbers such as 1, 2, 3, 4 and 12.34. 
• Zip codes such as 91234 and 92345. 
• Dates in a variety of formats such as 10/5/2023, 2023‐09‐12T23:59:04Z, and July 10 2020. 
• Custom ID formats such as AB10203 and A100003483E. 
• Latitude and longitude. 
• GPS Coordinates. 

Examples

Here are some example URLs and the group names that they can derive from: