Activity Section

The Activity section of the navigation bar provides access to detailed activity data for your organization’s web applications. The four sub-pages provide usage reports for Web Applications, Performance, Java, and ActiveX.

These reports provide very granular data in easy-to-read tables and graphs that provide key insights on a wide range of scenarios. These include reporting which web applications are most frequently accessed by which users, which applications are performing abnormally, and which web applications utilize specific versions of Java or ActiveX controls. The following sections provide a drilldown on the reports found in each sub-page.

Web Applications

The Web Applications page provides a view of accesses to each web application, sorted by the largest number of accesses by default, along with the number of users and machines from which those accesses occurred and any script errors occurring for that web application. The script errors data collection switch must be enabled on a per-web application basis, in the Summary tab of the Activity Detail view — it is off by default.

This report is comprised of a visualization of popular applications at the top (in graph form), and the full list of applications visited at the bottom (in table form) in the Accesses section.

A filter at the top of each Activity page allows you to easily limit the results displayed by zone, browser, machine name or domain user, Client IP, AD Site, or User OU values:

Usage Graph

Hover the mouse pointer over any element in the graph to see more information:

This will display both the application / site name as well as the number of times that particular application was accessed in the date range currently being viewed.

Accesses View

The table lists results based on filters applied and date range chosen in the date picker control:

• Name of unique web applications visited

• Number of times in total that web application has been visited

• Number of unique users who have visited that web application

• Number of unique machines that have visited that web application (as machines can have more than one user)

• Script errors that have been logged by users access that web application

Users can find information in the list by typing relevant web application names or sub-strings in the search box.

The search box is limited to searching the web application name field. Filters can be used to filter the view by browser, zone, and many other parameters.

Click on any row in the table for detailed information about that web application. Additional details on page level activity can be accessed by clicking any row of the Activity Detail page to access the Web Application Details for a given web application.

Page level Activity Detail reporting includes additional information about Document Mode, X-UA-Compatibility/META Tags, and User Agent values.

Browser View

Selecting the ‘Browsers’ view of the table will instead show which browsers, document modes, Ion profiles, and Internet Explorer Zones have been used to access the web applications.

Activity Detail View

Proton includes a granular display of the details for every web application. Select any web application from the Access or Browsers view, then click to open the Activity Detail view.

The Summary tab of the Activity Detail view includes the name and description of the web application, along with the option to edit the fields so that they’re more relevant to your organization. You’ll also see summary usage stats, displaying the number of accesses, users, URLs, and user accounts (if user account tracking is enabled) during the date range selected in the data picker control.

Data collection options provides granular control, per web application, for enabling collection of performance analytics, script errors, and server IP addresses. Each of these settings has a master control on the Configuration page, which must be enabled before you can enable the data collection option for a given web application.

The Users tab provides details on unique user accesses, including org unit, and machine names. This information can be anonymized using Privacy Mode.

The Users tab also includes web application performance data that is collected on the client with each web application access. In this view, you can see data for web page load times for each user of the web application including the count of measurements, minimum, mean, and maximum values. Sorting by this column (descending) is an easy way to see which users are having a slower experience with this web application. You can often pick out patterns here — users with the same org unit, for example. Keep in mind that the load times shown here are aggregate across all URLs in the web application, so it might simply be that some users have different usage profiles (e.g. a tendency to access more complex pages in the web app). Drilling down from here into the actual accesses will enable you to explore that data in more detail.

The URLs tab includes details on rule matches (see the Rules Page for more information on rules), accesses, load times, browsers used, document modes invoked, Java versions used, Ion profiles invoked, Internet Explorer zones, and script errors. This tab also includes page load times, although the view here is grouped by URL rather than user. Sorting by page load time (descending) here will show you what URLs tend to be loaded more slowly and drilling down from here will show you the actual accesses (with all the user, component, browser, and timing data) that have contributed to the load time data that is displayed.

Clicking on any row in the URLs table will display the detailed activity for that URL. You’ll be presented with rows of activity data, each representing a unique access to that web application by an individual user. Complete details of these data tables are found in the Activity for URL section of this guide.

The Performance tab provides detailed graphs of accesses, page load times, and total time for each web application for the period selected in the date picker control. This is called the Performance History report and is detailed in the Performance section of this guide.

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Activity for URL

In addition to the details for a given web application, Proton offers an even greater level of detail of each page access. Clicking on any URL value in the Web Application Details page will bring up the Accesses page.

The default view for the Activity for URL page is the User view, where each row provides detailed info on the URL accessed. The data includes:

• Date of access

• Activity ID (an internal Proton value to uniquely identify each navigation)

• Machine and User information

• AD Site (if domain joined)

• IP Address

Proton assigns an Activity ID to each navigation to ensure statistical and analytical consistency for when Privacy features have been enabled. The Activity ID is unique to an action but when Privacy is enabled and user/machine data is anonymized, the Activity ID ensures report and data integrity while maintaining user anonymization.

The next view, Components, displays detailed access information of any extension/add-ons used on the given pages. The data includes:

• Date of access

• Activity ID (an internal Proton value assigned to navigations)

• Java Version (Requested and Used)

• ActiveX Control (Requested and Used

The Browser view provides detailed access information about the browser criteria, modes and settings used to render the given pages. The data includes:

• Date of access

• Activity ID (an internal Proton value assigned to navigations)

• Detailed Browser version number (if greater than IE8)

• Document Mode (If using Internet Explorer)

• X-UA Compatible Meta Tag (If using Internet Explorer)

• User Agent value

• Ion Profile used (if applicable)

Switching to the Performance view includes the same date, and Activity ID, as well as more details on specific page load timing behaviors.

The Total column provides information on the total page load time (in seconds). Total page load is defined as the sum of the Fetch and Process times.

The Fetch column shows the time to retrieve the page (in seconds). The Fetch value is calculated from the time the navigation begins until the response is ended.

The Process column provides the time to process and render the page (in seconds). The Process value is calculated from the time the response is ended until the DOM is completely loaded.

Performance

Understanding how web applications are performing in your environment is essential to running an efficient enterprise. Business critical web applications suffering from poor performance can have a very significant cost impact to your company from lost end user productivity and generation of support tickets. For web applications used by employees in customer facing disciplines (e.g., customer support, sales, etc.), performance problems with the web application can directly impact the customer’s experience with the company and the bottom line. On the IT side, web applications that are not scaled correctly for their loads can likewise have a significant cost in time and attention of IT employees due to extra monitoring and frequent emergency maintenance activity.

Proton provides a very simple and powerful set of data and insights to assist you in troubleshooting and isolating web application performance issues, as seen by the actual client endpoints in your enterprise, at a granular level. Using this data, you can determine if performance problems exists on web applications for a single user, grouping of users, geographic basis, or if the issue is impacted by time of day or even by other browsing activity. This data identifies issues and anomalies that would otherwise be invisible to existing performance monitoring solutions.

Proton achieves this by collecting detailed performance metrics, including how long each page load takes on each client PC. With this data, Proton can summarize the performance of multiple web applications, including historical and current page load times, and surface how the current load times compare with the historical average. This is displayed on the main Performance page in the Activity section.

The charts on this page allow you to quickly answer questions about web application performance in your enterprise. The chart on the left (Total Time) shows the total amount of time in minutes that end users are currently spending in each web application waiting for pages to load. This is a compound measurement that takes into account both the frequency of use and the speed of the web application, allowing you to focus on performance issues for the web applications that matter most to your organization. The green bar is the “expected” total time, based on the historical mean, while the yellow represents the “unexpected” total time, in excess of the historical mean. This allows you to answer the question — “which frequently used applications in my enterprise are currently significantly slower than usual?” — and gives you the ability to drill down and find out why.

The chart on the right (Accesses), shows total number of accesses for each web application. The higher the count, the more popular, or heavily used, the web application is — and the more relevant it is to your organization. If you see an application with a moderate yellow bar (unexpected load time) in the chart on the left, but a very high accesses count in the chart on the right, troubleshooting may be a high priority as a lot of users, or a smaller set of very active users, are affected. Conversely, if you see an application with a large unexpected load time in the chart on the left, but a small number of accesses on the right, that tells you that this application is currently much slower than its historical average, but not very heavily used, and therefore may be a lower priority for troubleshooting.

You can control the time interval using the dropdown above the charts. The default time interval is 5 minutes. A good practice is to set the time interval to be roughly 50% of the data push interval, set on the Configuration page.

As with most charts in Proton, the underlying table is sortable by any column and will affect the chart display. By default, the table is sorted by Unexpected Load Time, with the highest first by default. When you sort the table by Total Time (descending), the charts allow you to answer the question “where are my employees currently spending the most time?”. You can also filter the table using the Filters at the top of the page or by searching for a specific web application using the Search box.

Selecting any row in the table will look up the activity detail for that web application, displaying the Performance History report (also found in the Performance tab within the Web Application Details View in section 3.3.1.4).

The Performance History report is a quick and easy way to recognize patterns in performance over time for any given web application. On this page, you see a compound chart that displays number of accesses, page load time, and total time at an hourly granularity. Selecting any time period on the charts will highlight that period across all three charts and display a set of tables under the charts with the user and access details for that time period. Selecting anywhere else on the chart will de-select that time period.

Because these three charts are synchronized on the axis of time, it’s easy to see your usage patterns for the web application — time of day, days of the week, along with the corresponding performance of the web application. For example, if you see that a web application page load time tends to increase regularly as accesses increase, you might want to look further at whether that web application is scaled appropriately for its load. These charts are also subject to the same top-level filters as many other pages in Proton Manager, so it’s easy to restrict the data to slices of your enterprise by geography, network topography, org unit, browser, or individual and see how the patterns change. This can help you diagnose performance issues affecting specific individuals, locations, or business units.

After identifying an interesting time slice, the tables below contain the data that you need to dive in and analyze the issue in more detail. As with other tables in Proton, you can even export the data to do more complex analytics in a tool of your choice.

Java

With the many uses of Java, detailed reporting becomes critical. Accordingly, this report includes several breakout tabs to offer easily consumed views of the complex use cases for Java. The tab options are Attempts by URL, Activity by Version, Activity by URL, Ion Remediation, and Requested vs. Used. The Java report provides a view of all discrete Java versions used across all Proton client systems.

On the Activity by URL, Ion Remediation and Requested vs. Used views, Clicking the link in the URL column will copy that value to the clipboard. Clicking any other data in that row brings up the Access detail page view for that URL.

Java Attempts by URL

The default view for Java is attempts by URL:

This view provides a detail count the number of times that web applications try to execute Java, regardless of whether those attempts were successful.

Java Activity by Version

Each row represents a unique Java version.

Clients indicates the total number of clients that have that version of Java installed. This is useful for answering the question “What’s the most prevalent version of Java installed in my org?”

Times Used is a count of how many times that version of Java has been instantiated by clients. This is useful for answering the question “What’s the most used version of Java in my org?”

The Used by Apps column indicates the number of distinct applications that have used that version of Java. This is useful for answering the question “What is the version of Java that most applications use?”

Java Activity by URL

Each row represents a web application as a group of URLs, all of which are broken out within the grouped row.

URL is the specific and detailed list of all URL associated with the specific web application.

The Version column displays which Java version was used by the specified URL. Clicking this item brings up the Access detail page view for that URL.

Clients indicates the total number of clients that have that version of Java installed. This is useful for answering the question “What’s the most prevalent version of Java installed in my org?”

The Accesses column displays the number of times that URL was accessed.

Java Ion Remediation

Browsium customers using Ion for Java management use this report to understand where Ion is used to replace Java versions for specific web applications.

Each row represents a web application as a group of URLs, all of which are broken out within the grouped row.

URL is the specific and detailed list of all URL associated with the specific web application.

Ion Profile indicates the name of the Ion Profile that was used to invoke a specific version of Java. Note that Ion Profile will only be displayed for Full profiles, not Limited Java profiles.

The Version column displays which Java version was used by the specified URL. Clicking this item brings up the Access detail page view for that URL.

Clients indicates the total number of clients that have that version of Java installed. This is useful for answering the question “What’s the most prevalent version of Java installed in my org?”

The Accesses column displays the number of times that URL was accessed.

Java Requested vs. Used

Each row represents a web application as a group of URLs, all of which are broken out within the grouped row.

URL is the specific and detailed list of all URL associated with the specific web application.

The Requested column indicates the version of Java requested by that specific web application/URL.

The value in Requested may be listed as ‘Not Specified’, which indicates the web application indicated a generic value for Java rather than a specific version value ID.

The Used column indicates the version of Java actually used by the client for that specific web application/URL.

Clients indicates the total number of clients that have that version of Java installed.

Some Java web applications will request a specific version of Java be used, but if that version is not available, the default version of Java will be run instead. This may explain why the versions of Java requested vs the versions of Java used are different in your organization.

Java Applications by Version

Proton can track Java usage instantiated from within the browser but is actually running outside as a standalone application. Some examples of these applications would be applications launched using Java Web Start.

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ActiveX

The ActiveX Usage report provides a view of all discrete ActiveX controls installed on any Proton client systems, including ActiveX control security values. The data can be viewed in several different ways, based on Activity usage.

Attempts by URL

The default view for ActiveX reporting is the Attempts by URL tab. Another way Proton can help an organization is through audit and compliance validation. The Attempts by URL report provides a navigation level view of which ActiveX controls were requested by a given URL, correlated to that control actually being loaded. This data is essential to ensure validation of internal controls, as well as provide a resource when attempting to investigate when and where a specific control is needed — so the use can be locked down or eliminated. The data in this chart includes:

• Web application (name if defined, otherwise the TLD)

• URL (detailed path value)

• Name of the ActiveX control referenced

• Specific version of the ActiveX control loaded (or ‘not used’)

• Number of client systems on which the activity occurred

Clicking the detail in a row brings up the Access view page for the given URL.

ActiveX Activity by Control

This tab view provides a row-by-row listing of each ActiveX control and the following specifics:

• Detailed version number

• Number of client systems on which it is installed

• Number of times that control was accessed by any visited web application

• Number of unique web applications where the ActiveX control was accessed

• Security marker values for the given control: Safe for Scripting and Safe for Initialization

Click any row in the report for more detailed information about that ActiveX control:

A filter at the top of the chart allows users to easily find Java versions as instantiated by zone, browser, machine name or domain user, Client IP, AD Site, or User OU values:

In addition, columns can be sorted in ascending or descending order by clicking on the arrow sort button next to the column label.

ActiveX Activity by URL

This view provides a view of the ActiveX control data by URL, enabling an easy way for administrators and security staff to see what is required (or requested) for a given web application. The items on this view are:

• Web application (name if defined, otherwise the TLD)

• URL (detailed path value)

• Name of the ActiveX control referenced

• Specific version of the ActiveX control loaded

• Number of client systems on which the ActiveX control was used

• Number of accesses for the given URL

Clicking the detail in a row brings up the Access view page for the given URL.