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Creating Rules

Once Browsium Proton has been activated on your server, and you’ve installed Browsium Client on a few client PCs (configured to communicate with your BCMS via the ConfigurationServerURL registry key), you can begin creating rules. Rules serve two functions:

  1. Map rules govern web application mappings to make it easier to combine and track accesses to specific web applications.

  2. Ignore rules allow you to choose sites to ignore, so they don’t appear in activity reports and are no longer sent from Proton Clients to the Proton Server.

Create and Test a Map Rule

Section titled “Create and Test a Map Rule”

Map rules are very useful if you have web applications that have complex or non-obvious URLs. Map rules allow you to create a friendly name for those URLs so they’re much easier to read and analyze in Proton’s activity reports.

For this example, we have identified a website, yourang.us, which has a number of web applications, each performing a different function. YouRang also has a few web applications that use non-continuous URLs — that is, the same application has a few unique URLs (/order_phone.htm and /purchase_phone.htm) that cannot be easily string-matched to aggregate them into a single view of usage of that application. Map rules will be very helpful in turning a variety of end user accesses of this section of the YouRang website into meaningful information.

To create the map rules needed for the YouRang phone ordering application, use the following steps:

  1. Visit the Rules node of the Proton Manager

  2. Select ‘New Rule’ to create a new rule.\

  3. The New Rule dialog pops up with its default values.\

  4. Keep the default values for Action: Map and Match Type: Simple, and enter “yourang.us/order_phone.htm” (without quotes) as the Match String. Then choose New web application for the Map to Web Application value and enter “YouRang Order Phone” with an appropriate description. Enable the rule and add a description for the rule.\

  5. Next, repeat the steps above for the purchase_phone.php page, assigning it to the web application YouRang Order Phone created in the prior step.\

  6. We now have two map rules, aggregating all accesses to yourang.us/order_phone.htm and yourang.us/purchase_phone.php to a single web application called YouRang Order Phone.\

  7. Viewing the Activity node and filtering the view to the Order Phone application shows us the aggregate results, at both the summary and detail level.\

Create and Test an Ignore Rule

Section titled “Create and Test an Ignore Rule”

Ignore rules are very useful if you have users accessing websites that you don’t want to track in Proton (such as social media or e-commerce sites — though many organizations would love to know how much of that activity is happening during work hours). Another common scenario for ignore rules is to ignore accesses to the Browsium Client Manager as that traffic can dwarf accesses to other web applications if you’re accessing the Manager multiple times a day to view reports or monitor Proton tracking activity in your organization.

For this example, we will create an ignore rule for our Browsium Client Manager using the following steps:

  1. First, let’s have a look at the traffic to a Browsium Client Manager (running at protondemo.browsium.com) without an ignore rule. We can do this by searching for the string ‘proton’ in the Activity page. We see a single access by 1 user.\

  2. Now let’s create some ignore rules. Select ‘New Rule’ to create a new rule.\

  3. The New Rule dialog pops up with its default values.\

  4. Next we’ll change the Action from the default Map to Ignore. We’ll leave Match Type as Simple. For the Match String, enter the server URL. For this example, we’ll use protondemo.browsium.com. We’ll set the rule to Enabled and give our rule a description.\

  5. After saving changes, we visit our Activity node and again search for activity containing the text ‘proton’. No results are found, thanks to our ignore rule.\

Ignore rules not only suppress activity from the Activity reports, but they also instruct Proton Clients to no longer send activity to the server that matches the ignore rule. It’s important to note that data already stored in the BCMS is not deleted by an ignore rule; it’s simply invisible to reports.