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Load Balancer Considerations

Products

Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Webtrends Analytics 9.x

Cause

If you plan to install SDC on multiple computers behind a load balancer, there are additional network and operations considerations.

  • Install the same version on each SDC computer. When you upgrade versions, you need to install the new version on each before you bring any of them back on line.
  • Configure each SDC computer the same way so that they are mirror images of each other. Any differences in configuration could cause problems during analysis, particularly for settings such as cookies.
  • Implement a method of gathering the log files from each SDC computer and moving them to a location accessible by WebTrends Analytics. After you install SDC, you will create a WebTrends profile that specifies the collection of log files to use for reporting.
  • Make sure that the client IP logged is not the IP address of the load balancer. Some load balancers are configured to overwrite the client IP address resulting in reports that show all traffic coming from one visitor.
  • Make sure that the load balancer is not configured to track visitor sessions, because hits from SDC contain all the data needed that enable WebTrends to identify visitor sessions. Configuring the load balancer to identify hits throughout the session slows the web server needlessly.
  • As a best practice, you should configure the load balancer to host the SSL certificates if you want to use SSL. Hosting the certificates on each SDC server would put unnecessary burden on the server, degrading performance.

Resolution