Products
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Webtrends Analytics 9.x
Cause
You (or your IT staff) notice that one of your computers or web servers is getting hit by a lot of traffic from one of your Webtrends servers. This may come and go at seemingly random intervals, and may result in degraded performance for the targeted computer(s). This may be reported as a denial of service attack by your IT staff.
Resolution
What is most likely happening (assuming your Webtrends server is not infected by a virus) is that the HTTP Page title retrieval feature is performing these requests. This feature tries to obtain a valid page title for every URL in your reports. This helps make the report more readable. This process happens during the profile’s analysis cycle, and usually looks in 3 different places for the title. First off, if you are using an SDC and have a standard JavaScript tag, you will have a parameter WT.ti that contains this title. If we don’t have a WT.ti value, the engine looks at the page title cache for the profile. If there is no valid title there, it does a GET request for the URL. It is these GET requests that you are seeing.
The key identifier for this type of traffic is the user agent on the hits, it will read “WebTrends/3.0 (WinNT)”. This traffic will occur whenever an analysis is running, and can be directly correlated to the volume of traffic you are analyzing.
This lookup will try to hit your web server to get page titles for your webpages. It will try to hit your desktop machines, or your users’ desktop machines if they are saving files to their hard drives that contain the JavaScript, and then opening them locally.
You can stop this behavior by changing the global default setting, and then by disabling it in each existing profile.
To change the global default:
2. Click Web Analysis > Options > Analysis.
3. On the general tab, under “HTML Titles”, uncheck “Retrieve HTML Page titles”.
Note: This will still allow the cache to be used, and it will still update with new values from WT.ti.
To change the individual profile setttings:
2. Click Web Analysis > Reports & Profiles.
3. Edit a profile.
4. On the Analysis tab, uncheck “Retrieve HTML Page titles”.
You may have to disable both the global setting, and each individual profile setting to get this behavior to stop. After disabling the global setting, all new profiles should be created with page title retrieval disabled.