Oracle® Real User Experience Insight Release Notes

11g Release 1

E22304-04

Oracle® Real User Experience Insight

Release Notes

11g Release 1 for Linux x86-64

E22304-04

April 2011

Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) provides you with powerful analysis of what your end-users are encountering. You can monitor the network and business infrastructure, the real-user experience, define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and trigger alert notifications for incidents that violate them.

RUEI is a Web-based utility to report on real-user traffic requested by, and generated from, your Web infrastructure. It measures the response times and user transactions at the most critical points in your network infrastructure. A must-have diagnostics facility allows Application Managers, IT technical staff, and business owners to perform root-cause analysis.

This document provides information about the changes introduced to Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) in release 11.1. Known issues and limitations are also described. It is recommended that you review its contents before installing the product or upgrading to this version of the product.

This document contains the following sections:

- Section 1, "New Features Included in the Release"

- Section 2, "Installation/Upgrade Procedure"

- Section 3, "Known Issues and Limitations"

- Section 4, "Compatibility Issues"

- Section 5, "Bugs Fixed"

- Section 6, "Product Documentation"

- Section 7, "Documentation Accessibility"

1 New Features Included in the Release

- Diagnostics integration with Oracle Business Transaction Management (BTM)
Cross-product navigation has been enhanced to provide seamless contextual analysis between RUEI and Oracle Business Transaction Management (BTM). Through this, a user experience problem can be diagnosed in the context of your composite applications. A slow or incorrect transaction leading to a user problem and reported in RUEI can be traced throughout the application stack using the deep transactional diagnostics in BTM. This enables Customer Support, Operations, and Application Support to collaboratively analyze individual transactions to resolve failures, slowdowns, and errors. Moreover, MTTR for enterprise composite applications can be greatly reduced by taking advantage of the combination of user experience monitoring and Business Transaction Monitoring.

- Comparing data across different periods
RUEI now supports data comparison between periods. This allows for any period selection (such as hours, days, or weeks) to be compared with an equal period starting at a different date. The compare graphs can be build in the Data Browser, stored, and later used as reports or dashboard widgets. For example, to compare traffic levels or the incidence of page errors. For more information, see section 3. 9 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Up to 80% reduction possible in MTTR of KPI calculation, reports, and alerts
KPI metrics are now calculated every minute instead of every five minutes. This allows reports and alerts to be sent every minute, and can result in a possible 80% reduction in MTTR for any metric-related issue. Moreover, the KPI wizard supports thresholds of 1-15 minute intervals providing additional flexibility for reports and alerts. Previously, KPI results were only calculated and reported for each 5-minute period. For further information, see chapter 7 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Extended support for XPath content scanning
Support for the use of XPath queries has been extended to provide full XPath 1.0 functionality for content scanning. This provides far greater configuration options to extract reporting information from Web services and page content. For more information, see Appendix F of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide. If you are upgrading from a previous version, it is strongly recommended that you read the Section 4, "Compatibility Issues" section for important information about the use of this functionality.

- Support for database outage recovery
The auto-recovery facility has been enhanced to handle brief database outages. In the event that connection to the database fails, the database auto-recovery facility attempts to reconnect to the database 10 times, with an interval of 6 seconds between each retry. Hence, it will attempt to re-establish the connection for up to 1 minute after the outage.

- High availability support for RUEI Reporter
It is now possible to configure a passive failover Reporter system that will seamlessly take over processing in the event that the primary Reporter system is not available. For further information, see Chapter 9 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight Installation Guide.

- High availability support for RUEI data Collectors
It is now possible to configure passive failover Collector systems that will seamlessly take over processing in the event that a primary Collector system is not available. Note that this facility is only available for remote Collectors. For further information, see Chapter 10 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight Installation Guide.

- KPI data available to external utilities
The Enriched data export facility has been enhanced to provide external access to current and historical KPI data. The data can be stored within the Reporter database, or be configured to use an alternative database for its storage. Access to the KPI data is through SQL. For further information, see Appendix R of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide. The configuration of an alternative database for export data storage is described in Appendix B of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight Installation Guide. Note that changes to the export scheme may be introduced in a later release based on customer feedback.

- Collector profiles
To improve the management of large environments with multiple Collectors, it is now possible to manage a single Collector (or a group of Collectors) via profiles. A profile ensures that all configuration settings (such as security configurations, encoding settings, traffic filters, and so on) apply to all Collectors assigned to the profile, and any configuration updates are automatically applied to all Collectors belonging to the profile, while all other Collectors remain unchanged. For further information, see section 3.11 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide. Note that if you are upgrading from a previous version, please see Section 4, "Compatibility Issues" for important information.

- Extended user flow support
The reporting of user flow information has been extended by the addition of completed and aborted user flows as possible report criteria. This allows for the creation of reports focused only on completed user flows (such as total and average server and network time, page-loading time, page-views, and content errors per user flow). These are viewable through the All user flows group. In addition, the conversion of service test sessions into RUEI user flows has also be optimized to better reflect the structure of the underlying service test session. For more information, see Chapter 9 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Support for alternative HTTP request headers for client IP address when using CDNs
It is now possible to specify multiple HTTP request headers as the source of the client IP address, together with the order of evaluation priority. This facility is particularly useful when you want to specify the use of a primary header (such as Akamai) and that, when not available, proxy headers should be used as the fallback source. For more information, see Appendix O of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Masking sensitive information
The masking facility has been extended to enable you to configure which information from (persistent or session) cookie values and Oracle Forms elements will be logged. For more information, see Section 13.5 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Disabling of remote Collectors
In addition to the facility to disable a local Collector (that is, the Collector instance running on the Reporter system), it is now also possible to disable remote Collectors. This has the benefit that remote Collectors can now be seamlessly brought down for maintenance or troubleshooting purposes. For further information, see section 3.11 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Support for Oracle ADF region monitoring
The monitoring of Oracle ADF applications has been extended with the detection and reporting of the last active region within which an end-user action takes place. This provides for more granular reporting, and captures exactly where a function was used by a user within an ADF application. For more information, see Appendix I of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

2 Installation/Upgrade Procedure

The installation procedure, together with the procedure to upgrade an existing RUEI 6.x installation to version 11.1, is fully described in the Oracle Real User Experience Insight Installation Guide.

Important: Upgrading From Version 6.5.1 (or Earlier)

Due to a known bug (11933858), customers upgrading from version 6.5.1 (or earlier) to 11.1 should issue the following commands immediately after completing the upgrade procedure:

su - moniforce
rm -f $RUEI_DATA/processor/projects/wg/data/*.{txt,dat,ipl}
use force

Important: not Possible to run the ruei-prepare-db.sh Script on a Remote Database Server

Due to a known bug (12340033), it is not possible to run the ruei-prepare-db.sh script as provided on a remote database server during the installation or upgrade procedure. On the remote database server, you should modify the following line near the top of script:

export SQLPLUS=${INSTANTCLIENT_DIR}/bin/sqlplus

to the following:

export SQLPLUS=${ORACLE_HOME}/bin/sqlplus

Important: Filtering Network Traffic Based on Domain Names

Article 1320386.1 describes how network traffic can be filtered based on domain names. If you are using the implementation described in this article, you should follow the procedure described in the article 1198923.1 after upgrading to 11.1. Otherwise, you may experience traffic flooding.

3 Known Issues and Limitations

The following issues are known to exist with the release:

- Vertical bar chart visualizations not available within dashboard items
Due to size constraints, the vertical bar chart visualization is only available for time-based dashboard items.

- External JavaScript files need to be downloaded within Replay viewer
If you are using the Internet Explorer browser within the Replay viewer, when clicking a link to an external JavaScript file, you are first prompted to download the external file. In addition, when replaying a page which includes a download hit file (such as an .exe or .rpm), you are prompted to save the file. This does not occur with Mozilla Firefox.

- Long dimension level names are truncated
All dimension level names are limited to 254 characters. If a name is longer than this, it is automatically truncated. Note truncated data is indicated by ending with an ellipse (…).

- Non-application traffic not represented in Traffic summary
Currently, the Traffic summary facility (select System, then Status, and then Data processing) is based on application logic. Therefore, non-application traffic (such as suites, services, and SSOs) is not represented in the processing overviews.

- Mismatches between previewed reports and generated PDFs
Some characters are not rendered in the generated PDF file as they appear in the preview. This is because the preview facility uses locally installed client fonts, while the PDF generation facility uses the RUEI server installed fonts. The default font will cover most customer requirements. However, there are known issues with Asian and Eastern European bold characters. If necessary, you can install a suitable alternative font to resolve this issue. For further information, see the Oracle Real User Experience Insight Installation Guide.

- URL reporting
RUEI reports URLs in a human-readable format. This means the reported URLs, although they appear to be real URLs, cannot always be copied and pasted into the browser address bar. It is not possible to distinguish between the raw format (received by the Web server) and the more readable format (reported by RUEI). As a result, the following characters might receive a different meaning:, (comma), [, ], :, @, !, $, ', (, ), *, and +.

- Pages within the Replay Viewer
Application pages may not be available via the Replay Viewer within the Session diagnostics facility, or may appear garbled, if they are based on Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Examples of RIA frameworks include Ajax, Curl, GWT, Adobe Flash/Adobe Flex/AIR, Java/JavaFX, Mozilla's XUL, OpenLaszlo, and Microsoft Silverlight. However, if the page contains JavaScript code, the JavaScript replay facility can be used to modify the rendering of replayed pages. This is described in section 6.3 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Overlapping or repeated tagging definitions
Specifying identification definitions, as well as functional error definitions, that overlap (or are identical) across multiple applications, suites, or services can lead to unexpected results. This restriction applies to page-naming schemes, and any configuration based on custom tags, custom functions, and response content.

- Group names incorrectly assigned within ruling facility
Pages whose group is already present in the source structure (for example a URL), are not always correctly reported when using the advanced ruling facility.

- User flows are reported as anonymous and replay information is not available
User flows selected within the User flow diagnostics group are sometimes reported as anonymous, and no replay information for them is available.

- Users with application-specific permissions unable to view data within the All user flows group
Users who have only application-specific permissions can access the All user flows group within the Data Browser, but cannot view any data.

4 Compatibility Issues

If you are upgrading from a previous release, you should be aware of the reporting differences highlighted in this section.

- Collector profile support
As of version 11.1, support has been added for the management of Collector configurations through the addition of Collector profiles. After upgrading, each Collector registered with a Reporter is automatically assigned to its own Collector profile. In addition, a default (System) Collector profile is also created. In particular, be aware that if you plan on consolidating the new created profiles, all required SSL keys must to be imported into the intended profile(s).

It is strongly recommended that you carefully review (and, if necessary, modify) the assignment of all Collectors, and the configuration of to their associated Collector profiles, after upgrading an existing RUEI installation. For further information on Collector profiles, see section 13.1 of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

- Enhanced XPath support
As of version 11.1, support for the use of XPath queries has been extended to provide full XPath 1.0 functionality for content scanning. This has important implications when upgrading an existing RUEI installation. For further information on XPath support, see Appendix F of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight User's Guide.

The upgrade script reports all namespaces found in the current configuration. These must be defined upon completion of the upgrade process. Otherwise, your configuration will no longer work correctly. Note that namespaces are case sensitive.

In addition, be aware that XPath expressions executed against content that is not well-formed XHTML code can return different results than in previous versions. Therefore, it is strongly recommenced that you carefully review all XPath expressions used in your RUEI installation.

5 Bugs Fixed

The following bugs have been fixed in this release:

- No alert generated when tablespace is close to full (10381970).

- Static content information is reported in the Full Session Replay (FSR) facility as expired when it was actually never recorded (10397808).

- FSR data is not available for some pages (10435177).

- Dynamic pages incorrectly reported as static within the FSR facility (10435253).

- Memory leak within the Collector (11724759).

- Internal errors (illegal project name) reported in the Event log (11722661).

- Performance issues in the processing of monitored traffic (11709864).

- Duplicate step names not allowed when converting SLM sessions to user flows (10649291).

- Session sequence number missing from the exported enriched data (10254964).

- Internal error generated when uploading large content message files (10212608).

- Internal error generated when uploading Siebel suite configuration file (11835613).

- Long response time when loading a dashboard (11806081).

- Not possible to define user flows based on user ID (11787655).

- SLM steps shown in wrong order when converted to user flow (11736642).

- A '[' or ']' character in a custom dimension causes processing to fail (11722958).

- Not possible to use symlinks to move the http Collector directory to another location (11710371).

- DRCP usage blocks database shutdown (11689696).

- Client operating system not reported correctly with Chrome user agent (11656728).

- Modifying existing masking actions deletes rather than modifies them (10428044).

- Correlation items shown as empty in KPI overview (10427308).

- URL advanced ruling definitions lost after upgrading from 6.5.1 (10427235).

- The user type dimension within the FLEXCUBE DB suite always shows "none" (10406285).

- URL POST argument masking does not work for Oracle Forms traffic (10400979).

- Internal error generated when accessing "old" transaction reports (10386217).

- Network filter generates error (10385290).

- Suite searches within Session diagnostics not correctly rendered (10378020).

- Significant I/O increase after increasing STS size (10372082).

- Pages identified using indirect naming should be reported under the application owning the redirect (10363554).

- Collector cannot be restarted after adding a network filter (10302098).

- Internal error (instance wg_47) generated (10300928).

- Percentage counters should be shown with numerator hits or page views instead of 1 (10234858).

- RUEI is not aware of certain EBS actions and reports them as unidentified (9835633).

- Time zone differences between a Reporter system and a user GUI causes internal errors (9191694).

6 Product Documentation

The latest version of the product documentation is available via the link below:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/realuserei.html

7 Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible to all users, including users that are disabled. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Accessibility standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For more information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/.

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

Screen readers may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, some screen readers may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.

Deaf/Hard of Hearing Access to Oracle Support Services

To reach Oracle Support Services, use a telecommunications relay service (TRS) to call Oracle Support at 1.800.223.1711. An Oracle Support Services engineer will handle technical issues and provide customer support according to the Oracle service request process. Information about TRS is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/trs.html, and a list of phone numbers is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/dro/trsphonebk.html.

Oracle Real User Experience Insight, 11g Release 1 for Linux x86-64

E22304-04

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