Filtering out internal traffic (from your own organization)

by rocky

If you’re analyzing data for a web site that’s available to the public, you probably don’t want your own company’s traffic in the reports. (The situation is quite different if you are analyzing traffic on your company’s intranet.)

Filtering out your coworkers’ visits to your web site isn’t always straightforward. Here are the two most common situations and the solutions.

If you are analyzing SDC logs …

… and if your SDC server is hosted by your own organization (as opposed to a third party hosting service) then you need to filter out hits that are from your internal network. Internal IP addresses are also called private network IP addresses and they are a special set of IPs that are used only inside a network, for traffic from one point to another within the LAN. The same IP numbers can be used inside different networks. If you host SDC within the network (or a linked network), your internal traffic will probably be recorded as using one of these internal addresses.

In your WebTrends Domain Names report, you’ll see this traffic as the puzzling ”Reserved IP Address (private network)” entry.

Create an exclude-type hit filter for the following IP ranges.

     10.0.0.0–10.255.255.255
     172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255
     192.168.0.0–192.168.255.255
     1.0.0.0-2.255.255.255 (this one’s a little controversial
     but it doesn’t hurt to filter it too)

… or if your SDC server is hosted by somebody else (including WebTrends for the OnDemand product), you need to find out how you and your coworkers appear to the SDC server. You need your external IP address range(s). Here’s an approach:

1) Ask your IT people, particularly those involved in hosting

—-failing that —-

2) follow this procedure:

…..visit an IP detection site that you find by searching on the phrase “what’s my IP.” One such site is http://www.whatsmyIP.org
…..copy your IP address from that site’s screen. I’m calling this the “seed” IP address because it is probably just one out of many that your organization actually owns.
…..go to a good WhoIs. The WhatsMyIP.org site mentioned above has a good one right there on the same site. You can also go to the mother lode, which is http://www.ARIN.net.
…..paste the seed IP address into the WhoIs box and look at the results.
…..among other things, you should see your organization’s name right above an IP range. Ta-dah.
…..turn that range into an exclude-type hit filter in WebTrends.

Important note about 2): If your organization owns more than one non-contiguous range, you will end up with only one of them by using this method (it’ll be the contiguous range that surrounds the seed IP address that you obtained from the “what’s my IP” service). You can make a stab at finding other ranges by following the same general procedure, but obtaining other seed IP addresses by pinging any site names you know about. You may not need all of them, because it’s possible that your employees traffic will be originating in the IP address range you discovered by starting with your own computer’s IP address.

Yes, ping-ing. If you’re new to this term, I’m very happy to be the one to introduce you. It’s a venerable computer network acronym that has slopped over to common geeky language even though the non-acronym version actually predates the computer world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ping and http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ping.

Anyway.

To do a ping, open a Command Prompt window (that scary-looking black screen you might remember from the good old DOS days) and enter “ping xxx.yourdomain.com” or whatever. Try all your known variations like w w w.yourdomain.com and dealers.yourdomain.com and so on. The seed IP address will be in square brackets before the “32 bytes of data” phrase.

Your IT people, the ones involved in hosting, are looking more and more like the best place to go, eh?

If you are analyzing server logs ….

… and your site is hosted within your organization, somewhere on your network or a linked one, you should follow the “SDC server hosted by your own organization” steps

… and your site is hosted by an outside hosting provider, you should follow the “SDC server is hosted by somebody else” steps

Ping us if you have any comments or questions!

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