Custom Network Grouping Rules

Embrace provides automatic collapsing of network paths to group similar paths together for analytics purposes. We automatically collapse certain path elements if they match a common pattern, and we also group endpoints that have a similar prefix. This heuristic can be good enough for most cases, but sometimes it is necessary to override the behavior.

On the network settings page you can specify a list of desired groupings (or network grouping rules) that you want to apply to your endpoints. When we process a network request, we apply all the network grouping rules in sequence, where the first|last match wins.

Custom rules are applied on the backend on a going forward basis.

Rules Reference

We currently provide the following patterns:

• «wildcard» - Matches any single path segment
• «**» - Matches any number of path segments
• «ext:file_extension» - Matches a string ending with a period and a 2 to 5 character extension.

Sample Use Cases

Collapsing High Cardinality Fields

If you have an endpoint with a high cardinality field, such as a UUID, you may want to collapse all requests to that endpoint into a single group. You can achieve this by using the «wildcard» rule to collapse all the requests into a single group.

my.api.domain/v1/users/«wildcard»/messages

This will collapse the following requests:

my.api.domain/v1/users/1234bcdd/messages
my.api.domain/v1/users/user@mail.com/messages
my.api.domain/v1/users/test-user/messages

Preventing Collapsing of Specific Endpoints

You may have a specific endpoint that you do not want to collapse at all. In our previous example we may not want to collapse the test-user endpoint since we use that for testing purposes. We can achieve this by adding a rule that exactly matches the endpoint and placing it after the wildcard rule.

my.api.domain/v1/users/«wildcard»/messages
my.api.domain/v1/users/test-user/messages

Since the last rule wins, this setup will collapse all endpoints except for the test-user endpoint.

Collapse CDN Images

You can collapse endpoints for third-party SDKs into a single groups. For example, CDNs will have a large number of path segments with a common prefix.

my.cdn.domain/images/0x0/b/d/123x123/bd1234c-cb6f-4c9f-9df6-6787903c5442/file.jpg
my.cdn.domain/images/0x0/b/d/123x123/bd1234c-cb6f-4c9f-9df6-6787903c5442/image.jpg
my.cdn.domain/images/0x0/b/d/123x123/afcd333-4c9f-9df6-6787903c5442/splash.jpg
my.cdn.domain/images/icons/badge.jpg

You can collapse all the requests to the CDN into a single group by using the «**» rule and an extension rule «ext:jpg». Here's the new rule:

my.cdn.domain/images/«**»/«ext:jpg»