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404 pages generated by SDC include all query parameters

Products

Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Webtrends Analytics 9.x

Issue

404 File not Found error pages have been tagged with the Webtrends tag and the DCS.dcssta has been set to 404 so it will generate a return code of 404. As a result, the File Not Found errors report lists numerous one or two-visit pages with all of the Webtrends parameters being displayed in the URL.

Resolution

404 pages are not subject to any URL rebuilding so each visit, if not each 404 request, will have a unique record in this report.

The customer can create a custom report to apply URL rebuilding and report on these pages. Custom reports will not currently report on non-successful return codes, even if an include filter based on status code being 404 is applied to the custom report.

If the customer is using 8.7d or higher, a solution is to base page view determination on WT.dl=0 (or not present), leave the status code as 200 on the File Not Found hits, and instead set the WT.dl value, not DCS.dcssta, to 404 (or another available value). This will allow the customer to create a custom report that uses URL as the primary dimension, Referring Page as the secondary dimension, measures of Hits and Visits, and then apply an include filter to only include records with a WT.dl value of 404. Since page views are based on the WT.dl being zero or absent, the 404 records will not show in any reports based on pages.

You should take care when implementing this as it could conflict with other custom report or cause unexpected hits to show in other custom reports. As always, we can’t stress thorough testing enough.