How Discover tracks user agent information

Discover uses a four step process to handle user agents

Process

The process that Discover uses to process user agents is:
  1. Client sends user agent string. When a request is submitted to a web server, the client (browser or native application) submits a string that contains the publicly identifiable user agent string in the following variable, called a header, in the request. This example is a user agent string: 
    
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0;
.NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 
3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C)

    Depending on the type of client, the user agent string might be delivered in a different manner.

  2. Perform lookup of the user agent string against public standards. When the user agent string is detected, Discover performs a lookup against the applicable public standards:
    • Browscap for fixed desktop and mobile web browsers
    • Self-reporting from the Discover client frameworks for mobile native applications
    • This step is performed by the Discover Reference session agent. This step is included in the default pipeline. You do not need to do any additional configuration.
  3. Populate request variables with data. If a match between the submitted user agent string is found in one of the applicable standards, additional information that is contained in the public standard entry for the user agent is populated in custom variables that are stored in the request by Discover.
  4. Use request data. Various Discover components reference user agent information for search, replay, and reporting purposes, after you configure data objects.