Some Considerations in Generating Your Test Session

Before you capture your test session, you should consider the following items, which may affect the pages that you attempt to capture.

  • Session Identifier: You should decide how you are going to explore the web application in a way that permits you to uniquely identify the session through search and replay. When you test the captured session, you must be able to uniquely identify it.
    • If no unique identifier is available, you may be able to identify the session by timestamps.
    • If you licensed and deployed Unica Discover, you can use the visitor identifier that you configured for the product. See "Initial Configuration" in the Unica Discover Administration Manual.
  • Tracking Event: You should design your session so that you trigger at least one known event that you configured for the web application. Later, you can use this event as a key for digging through Discover report data to locate the completed session.
  • Scorecard: For testing report features, you should trigger an event that registers in a KPI or Process Scorecard.
  • DNCA: Before capture, you may want to open the Summary tab of the DNCA Web Console, where you may be able to monitor the traffic if there is little other activity on the web application.
    • If you have enabled data filter rules, configured traffic to ignore, or other tuning parameters, you may want to design your capture session so that you test these settings. For example, if you know of specific host traffic that is configured to be ignored, you should design your session to generate session data from that host, which is forwarded to the DNCA and then ignored. See "DNCA Web Console - Interface Tab" in the Unica Discover Discover Network Capture Application Manual.
    • If the DNCA is capturing some SSL traffic, you should design your session to explore secured areas of the web application. See "DNCA Web Console - Interface Tab" in the Unica Discover Discover Network Capture Application Manual.
    • The DNCA supports data sessioning, multiple capture modes, inclusion and exclusion of specific file extensions, and other features. You should be able to design your capture to identify that the captured and processed data properly reflects capture mode, file extension settings, and any data sessioning configuration that is managed through the DNCA. See "DNCA Web Console - Pipeline Tab" in the Unica Discover Discover Network Capture Application Manual.
    • The following configuration areas may require separate captures in order to test them well.
    • Privacy rules that are applied at the DNCA should be thoroughly tested. Depending on the complexity of your configured rules, you should consider reviewing each of them through a separately captured session. See "DNCA Web Console - Rules Tab" in the Unica Discover Discover Network Capture Application Manual.
      • Privacy Tester rules can also be tested through the external Privacy Tester utility. See "Privacy Tester Utility" in the Unica Discover Configuration Manual.
  • No additional tests are required. See "Initial Manage Services Configuration" in the Unica Discover Configuration Manual.
  • Unica Discover : No additional tests are required. See "Initial Portal Configuration" in the Unica Discover Configuration Manual.
  • Pipeline: No additional tests are required. See "Initial Portal Configuration" in the Unica Discover Configuration Manual.

Optional Components

  • Unica Discover: The key criteria for configuring Unica Discover are establishing a unique, multi-session identifier for each visitor and being able to search for visitors. See Testing for Unique Identifier.
  • Unica Discover Data Export: No additional tests are required. See "Initial Data Export Configuration" in the Unica Discover Configuration Manual.

To capture all of the above configuration items, you may decide to perform multiple captures of different aspects of the web application. Since some of the following tests are applied while the session is still active, you should perform all of the tests on the page for the first session before you begin capture and testing of any subsequent sessions.