Adding the Chrome browser to your reports
Applies to: software
(Note – in November 2008 WebTrends started making updated copies of browsers.ini and keywords.ini available to software users from their web site! We’ll post more about this soon once we have checked it out.)
http://www.webtrends.com/support/browser-and-keywords-updater.aspx
Back to the original September post:
Google released the Chrome browser today. Here’s how to add it to your WebTrends configuration so it will show up in browser reports. (On Demand will start displaying Chrome as “Google Chrome” this coming Monday afternoon.) You can make the change yourself, or you can download an updated browsers.ini from WebTrends (go to the Knowledge Base, search on “analytics chrome”, look at the top result.)
The file you have to change is called browsers.ini.
There are usually three or four copies of browsers.ini on the typical WebTrends installation, and there could be extra copies on other servers if you use distributed architecture. You’ll need to change all of them. Typical locations are:
/WebTrends/modules/analysis/engine/8.0d (8.1, 8.5, etc)
/WebTrends/storage/config/component/lookupdata/
/WebTrends/storage/config/engine/8.0d (8.1, 8.5, etc)
/WebTrends/
Open the first instance of browsers.ini with a proper text editor. By “proper” we mean something like TextPad rather than Notepad, because Notepad doesn’t play well with the system when the file is in use. With TextPad, you can [usually] take the risk of changing the file while WebTrends is running.
Step 1 – Change the Browser list. Go to the end of the long Browser list. Find the last numbered entry. It’ll look something like this:
Browser28=GECKO
It looks like it’s a good idea to put Chrome above both Gecko and Safari, so insert a line above these two. It’ll look something like this:
Browser26=CHROME
Renumber! Make sure the numbers are in order!
Step 2 – Add the specifications. Go to the end of the specification list (groups of three lines). The last one might look like this (if your last one is Safari). It will be just above the [Wireless Browsers] section of the browsers.ini file.
[SAFARI]
log=SAFARI
text=Safari
Find the right spot in the list, corresponding to your numbered entry order in Step 1. Add a blank line and then this:
[CHROME]
log=CHROME
text=Google Chrome
Remember, this section has to be in exactly the same order as the first section!
Step 3. Save and close the file.
Step 4. Make the same changes to other copies of browsers.ini in your installation.
Step 5. Restart your Scheduler Service
There’s a decent chance that this restart won’t be necessary but it sometimes is needed, so do this step if you can (or if you notice that the browsers.ini change didn’t have an effect in your reports).
How do you do this? You have to log on to the WebTrends machine as a local administrator, go to Services (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services), select “WebTrends – Scheduler Agent” and click on Restart. Or, you ask somebody with admin access to do it.
Done! Your Browsers report will now show Chrome, and your Browser Versions report will show Chrome with its correct version number. The version number will probably change often.
NOTE for the future: Keep a copy of the new and old browsers.ini somewhere safe. Any WebTrends upgrades will overwrite your modified browsers.ini with the one that comes with the install, so you will have to do some additional manual stuff after those upgrades or complete reinstalls.
Postscript: The browser string is kinda long, and the string “Chrome” may sometimes stray outside the WebTrends 8.0x limit of 100 characters. Here is one way I’ve seen the UA field show up:
Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+en-US)+AppleWebKit/525.13+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/0.2.149.27+Safari/525.13
You can see that both Gecko and Safari appear as strings in there. Because I want Chrome to show as Chrome rather than Gecko or Safari, I placed the Chrome entry a bit higher in the list in my Step 1.
4 comments
Aren’t you supposed to restart the WT services to make the changes to browsers.ini effective?
It’s not necessary, except sometimes. I don’t know what the “sometimes” circumstances are. But it’s a good idea to do it, and I’ve added it as Step 5. Thanks Jacques.
I did not restart anything when I added Chrome and it worked fine.
IS this same for both SDC and Weblog profiles? Or there is some other method to set it up for SDC collection?
It’s the same. Both SDC and weblogs will track the browser string, identically.
Leave a Comment