Products
Webtrends Analytics 8.5x
Webtrends Analytics 8.1x
Issue
The Browsers report shows a large amount of traffic for Netscape browsers, yet the raw log files do not show this traffic. Firefox user-agents are commonly reported as being Netscape user-agents. This occurs when the user-agent strings in the log files have URL-encoded characters.
Example:
Mozilla%2F5.0+%28Windows%3B+U%3B+Windows+NT+6.0%3B+fi%3B+rv%3A1.9.1.3%29+Gecko%2F20090824+Firefox%2F3.5.3+%28.NET+CLR+3.5.30729%29
The 8.1x and 8.5x engines will not translate these values, which then creates a match to the hard-coded legacy Netscape browser.
This is a limitation in the above versions of the product. The Webtrends 8.7d and higher engines translate and report these values correctly.
This behavior only occurs in server logs, and typically only for sites using a language other than English, and it can occur if a site is using a character set other than UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.
Resolution
These values must be manually translated prior to analysis, the web site’s character set must be changed to unicode, or the log file format must be set to the W3C Extended Log File Format.
The above user-agent string manually translates to the following example:
Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+6.0;+fi;+rv:1.9.1.3)+Gecko/20090824+Firefox/3.5.3+(.NET+CLR+3.5.30729)
For more details, refer to the attached reference for common URL-encoded characters.