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Pipeline Settings

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Aleksandra Grochowska
  • Updated

The Pipeline tab allows users to edit configuration parameters such as capture, limits, and cookie IDs.

  • If the fields are left blank, the device attempts to read default values from the ctc-conf-defaults.xml file.

You can select either of the two views to display pipeline settings:

  • Pipeline Settings - Define data sessioning, time grading, capture mode, and more.
  • Edit Type List - Specify the data types and file extensions to include or exclude from capture.
    Note: PCA capture types must be reviewed during any installation of the CX Passive Capture Application or if the monitored web application is updated.

Pipeline instances

By default, the PCA is configured to create a single instance of the PCA pipelined process for use by all instances of the PCA application. If needed, more instances of the pipelined process can be created to more efficiently distribute the work across available resources.

Note: Multiple instances of the PCA pipeline are available in PCA Build 3403 or later.

When multiple instances of the pipelined process are created, each instance of the PCA application submits the TCP packets. These packets are assembled by its reassd process to the pipeline queue. This queue then distributes the packets for processing to the configured pipelined instances in a round-robin fashion.

The PCA pipelined process takes the individual HTTP hits and performs processing on them, such as dropping hits, applying privacy, data compression, and more.

The effectiveness of multiple pipelines depends on the number of available CPU cores. The general rule of thumb is to allocate one available CPU core for each pipeline instance. If four idle CPU cores are available, you must configure no more than four pipeline instances if you expect a full CPU load.

Note: You must always leave at least one CPU core in the machine for system-based processes. The theoretical maximum limit on the number of pipelines is 128. It is not likely you must approach this limit.
Note: All pipelines operate on the same set of configuration rules. There must be no differences between privacy rules or other configuration options between multiple pipelines.
Note: Be conservative when creating new instances of the pipelined. Increment instances by one and then assess the results and impact on available resources on the PCA server.

To retrieve statistics on an individual pipeline instance, run the following commands.

Instance #0 stats:


ctcstats instdata

Instance #N stats:


ctcstats -I<#N> instdata

where <#N> is the instance identifier.

Data Sessioning

The PCA can be configured to create a session id for each hit that is based on cookies injected into the request. When enabled, you can configure the request section and field information that is containing the session identifier.

The cookie on which to session must be unique and persist for each hit in a session.

When data sessioning is enabled, the session id/cookie specified by the Field Name value is hashed to create the session identifier (TLTSID). If the Cookie Injector is in use, it creates this value.

Note: If you are using the Tealeaf Cookie Injector, do not enable this feature. The Tealeaf Cookie Injector provides guaranteed unique identifiers for session data that is captured by Tealeaf. If there is no session cookie, you can be able to sessionize off other hit data by deploying the Sessioning session agent in the Windows™ pipeline on the Processing Server.
Property
Description
Field Name
The name of the cookie on which you want to sessionize. Accepted values include jsessionid and aspsessionid.
  • To sessionize on multiple cookies, you can insert multiple delimited values in this field. Accepted delimiters are comma (,) or semi-colon (;)
Field Section
You can use this field to specify the section of the request in which to look for the Field Name. If this value is not specified, then the entire request is searched for the field, and the first occurrence is used.
Field Offsets
You to sessionize on a specific part of the session cookie, as specified by Field Name. For example, if your cookie value is 32 characters long, setting the value to 0 15 sessionizes on the first 16 characters. This feature is useful if the session cookie is appended with a static string: 

. jsessionid=<unique keystuff here>mycookie;

Session Sampling

If enabled, session sampling specifies a percentage of sessions to forward to the delivery peer. The remaining sessions are deleted from the capture. Session sampling allows for statistically significant volumes of data capture without burdening the system with production volumes.

Note: This feature eliminates session data from the capture stream and is intended as a debugging feature. Enabling it is not recommended.

Capture Mode

The Capture Mode setting specified the types of data that the PCA captures and drops from the capture stream. The following settings are available:

Capture Mode
Description
Business
Configures the Passive Capture software to capture only HTTP(S) request and response objects for .business. page requests (for example, HTML, ASP, JSP). Static objects such as style sheets, JavaScript™, and image files are not captured by the PCA.
  • Tealeaf replay clients can acquire and load these items on an as-needed basis during replay.
    Note: Business capture mode is the default and recommended setting.
BusinessIT
Configures Passive Capture to capture HTTP(S) requests and responses, as well as file objects associated with each hit. These static objects, such as image files, are captured by the PCA and passed to the Windows pipeline for further evaluation.
Note: In BusinessIT mode, the response object payload body is not saved. Only the image file and the request are captured and processed.
Note: Changing the capture mode from Business to BusinessIT significantly increases the volume of traffic that is captured, processed, and stored by Tealeaf. Before you change, review your entire Tealeaf solution to verify that you have the system resources to manage the payload increase. For more information, please contact Tealeaf Professional Services.

Time Grading

If enabled, Time Grading can assign a grade to a hit in one of the following three areas:

Area
Description
Web Server Page Gen
How long it takes the web server to serve up the page.
Network Transit
Measures network speed based on how much time a packet spent on the network.
Round Trip
How long it takes an arbitrary packet to travel from the client to the Web server.

Based on the three criteria, Time Grading assigns the hit a numerical grade. The default grade descriptions (Excellent, Normal, HighNormal, High) can be edited, along with their corresponding maximum values.

Hit processing

The following table describes the hit processing settings.

Table 1. Hit processing settings
Setting Description
Include Raw Request Determines whether RawRequest is on. RawRequest is an aid in debugging. The default value is False (disabled). If enabled (True), the HTTP Request headers are added to the hit.
Note: Set this value to False; otherwise, data is added to each hit.
Include Response Headers Determines whether ResponseHeaders are on. ResponseHeaders are aids in debugging. The default value is False (disabled). If enabled (True), the HTTP Response headers (in Tealeaf format, not necessarily the exact HTTP representation) are added to the hit.
Note: Leave this value set to False; otherwise, data is added to each hit.
Decode URL fields This option determines whether to URL-decode URL fields.
Cookie Parser If this option is selected, a cookies section is added to the request.
Enable UnReq Cancelled If enabled, this option checks the last 100 bytes of the response body for </html when capturetype=1 and marked as canceled.
Inflate compressed response When this option is selected, responses are automatically inflated in the PCA pipeline. If a response has a content-encoding header whose value is deflate, gzip, or x-gzip, then it is a candidate for having the body that is inflated from its compressed state. If this option is selected, then an attempt is made to inflate the response.
Note: This setting must be set to false. Enabling this feature can significantly increase the data volume that is transmitted between the CX Passive Capture Application server and the Transport Service.
  • If the inflate fails, a message is logged at the notice log level.
  • If the inflate succeeds, the value of the content-encoding header is overwritten with X's; for example, Content-Encoding: XXXX.
  • Compressed POSTs are automatically inflated for the content-encoding types, regardless of the content type, to support capture of data from Tealeaf client frameworks.
Preserve responses when inflate fails When a hit response is inflated and the inflate process fails, the response is replaced with HTML reporting that an inflate error is occurred. Select this option to disable the replacement HTML, which preserves the original response.
Deflate hits sent to target recipients Select this option to deflate hit responses before they are sent to a target recipient. The hit responses are compressed by using the HTTP deflate method. Enable this option to reduce the amount of network bandwidth that is used to deliver hits to the Transport Service.
Enable I18N When selected, internationalization support is enabled on the PCA. The request urlfields are encoded to UTF-8, and an attempt is made to detect the response body encoding.
Note: There is a known issue in which special characters submitted in JSON data from a client framework are mangled.
Delete Images on PCA side When enabled, this option deletes image hits in the capture stream that meet specific criteria.
Max Response Size The largest acceptable response size (in bytes). The default value is 1572864 (1.5 MB).
Default Response Encoding If the PCA is not able to detect the encoding type of a response, this value is used.
Default Request Encoding If the PCA is not able to detect the encoding type of a request, this value is used.
Total dropped due to ICU encoding errors This statistic reports each time a hit (either Request or Response) cannot be encoded to UTF-8 which causes the complete hit to be dropped. This scenario also generates an error (ERR) in the log.

Delete Images on PCA Side

The PCA provides DelImages functionality in the PCA pipeline. When DelImages is enabled in the PCA, the volume of data that is captured, processed, and transferred to the Windows server is reduced.

Note: To ensure the capture of image content throughout your Tealeaf environment, this setting must be consistently applied through the Pipeline tabs across all PCA instances.

If a hit meets the following criteria, then the hit is identified as an image hit and is dropped:

  • Delete Images on PCA side is enabled.
  • The file extension for the response is listed on the Excluded File Extensions list.
  • Either of the following criteria is met:
    • PCA CaptureType=3 and (StatusCode = 200 or StatusCode = 304)

      The previous criterion determines if the PCA is in BusinessIT mode (CaptureType=3) and an image request is returned with an "okay" status or a Not Modified status (StatusCode =304).

    • HTTP_USER_AGENT contains "RealiTeaViewer" or HTTP_USER_AGENT contains "TeaLeafFileGetter"

      The previous criterion determines if the request is being made by CX RealiTea Viewer desktop application for image content from the origin server during replay. These requests should not be captured.

If the previous criteria are met, then the image hit is dropped. When this feature is enabled, if CaptureType=1 and the response content type is listed in the Include Extension list, then both the request and the response are captured.

In the Statistics tab, the total count of dropped image hits is displayed in the Total dropped due to businessIT mode and DelImages feature set metric.

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