Products
Webtrends Analytics 9.2
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Cause
When setting up a Parent/Child profile, there are multiple ways to determine what identifies each child profile. You are also able to configure how Webtrends automatically discovers child profiles.
Resolution
There are three options for identifying child profiles:
- Domain
- SmartSource Site ID (DCSID)
- URL Query Parameter Value (WT.sp by default)
For the option you choose, a child profile will be created for each unique value. This can only be set at the creation of the profile.
Domain is the simplest and can be used to track subdomains or when tracking multiple sites that need the same reports.DCSID is useful if you want to have sites grouped. For instance, if you have multiple domains, each with subdomains, and you want them grouped by parent domain, you could use the same DCSID for all sites with the same parent domain and they would all be in the same child.
URL Query Parameter works where none of the others do. For instance, if you needed to use the same DCSID for a site, but wanted a child profile for each of the first level folders, you could assign a WT.sp value unique to each folder.
Once you have decided how to uniquely identify child profiles, you can define the valid auto-discovery settings. There are three options available: Always, Except for the specified identification strings, and Only for the specified identification strings.
Always is self explanatory and will create a new child profile for any unique child profile identifier Webtrends finds.
Specified identification strings will allow you to define a list of identification strings that you do not want to create new child profiles for. One example would be if you had a separate WT.sp value for each first level folders, but “admin” was one of these.Chances are you wouldn’t want to create a child profile just for “admin”, so you can exclude it.
Specified identification strings will also allow you to define a list of identification strings, but in this case, these are the identification strings you want to include and no others. This could be useful if you had a separate DCSID, subdomain, or WT.sp value for each country or language your site serves, but you are only really concerned about a few main ones. For example, myautosite.com may have WT.sp values for each country, but US, Canada, and the UK have been identified as the only countries to track. You would add these WT.sp values to the list of specified identification strings to include and only create child profiles for these countries.
More Information
In some cases, it is recommended to use full fledged profiles with hit files rather than a parent/child profile. This minimizes the risk to all profiles if corruption should occur in any one of them and also helps minimize the memory impact. Since all child profiles are analyzed together, one crashing could bring them all down and the memory usage of all of them combined could make this more likely than analyzing each profile individually.