Web Session Replay Resource Versioning
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing session recording systems for web-based applications face challenges in ensuring that resource files used during user interactions are accessible and accurate during replay, particularly when resources are behind login walls or subject to version changes due to continuous development, leading to incomplete or inaccurate replay of user experiences.
Innovation Solution
A monitoring system that captures resource content identifiers and annotates content documents, storing them on a monitoring server for later replay, ensuring that the same versions of resource files used during the session are accessed during replay, and employs probabilistic methods to minimize redundant resource capturing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If session recording systems capture all resource files during user interactions, then the accuracy of replay is improved, but the system complexity and storage requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential resource content identifiers (hash values) from the actual resource files during session recording. Instead of capturing complete resource files, the system captures compact identifiers that can later be used to retrieve or reconstruct the necessary resources during replay, significantly reducing storage requirements while maintaining replay accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary hashing of resource content during the session recording phase to generate content identifiers. These pre-computed identifiers are stored alongside session data, enabling efficient resource retrieval during replay without requiring re-hashing or complete resource storage, thus simplifying the replay process.
2Reliability
If the system captures resource content identifiers for every session, then resource version accuracy is improved, but the amount of data to be stored and processed increases
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of storing complete resource files, the system creates compact copies in the form of hash values (content identifiers). These hash copies serve as unique fingerprints of the resource content, enabling verification of resource versions without occupying significant storage space, thus maintaining reliability with minimal data volume.
3Loss of information
If the monitoring system stores complete resource files for replay, then replay completeness is improved, but the storage space and processing overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the essential identifying characteristics of resource files (their content hashes) rather than storing the complete files. This extraction approach maintains the ability to verify and retrieve resources during replay while dramatically reducing the storage volume required for maintaining replay completeness.
Data Source
AI summary
A technology is disclosed for the browser side capturing of user interaction session data and replay of the session data for a high-fidelity reconstruction of the experience the user perceived. In addition to capturing central structuring and markup documents and browser side updates thereof, additional resource documents that are loaded and used by the browser to render the central documents are captured and added to the session recording data. Identification information is created for resource documents, based on the content of those documents, which allows the capturing system to distinguish different versions of those content documents that share the same name but have different content. The captured session data contains data to identify the correct versions of resource documents during replay. Various measures to reduce the amount of transferred resource content data are applied, that consider already captured resource document versions or the usage frequency of a monitored application.