Filter page hits from a monitoring program

Question

I am running a SolarWinds synthetic transaction against my existing web site which is connected to GA. The synthetic transaction looks like a hit from vanilla IE (based on the agent string). Because of that, I am unable to filter it from the logs. Also, I am a GA newb.

The transactions are coming from agents running in Azure - so I cannot use IP addresses to filter them out (they are not static).

I can modify the initial hit from the monitor to add something to the querystring, but that is about it.

Does anyone know of another way to isolate this traffic so that GA can ignore it?

Thanks,

Judd

Answer 1

If you have a query string you can set an exclude filter in your views (Admin->Views->Filter->Custom Filter->Exclude) on the request uri field (with a pattern matching your query string), this will delete the hits before they are recorded (and take care not to remove the query string in the view setting or another filter as they are processed in sequence).

Filters will only work hit based, since you say "initial hit" (which suggest there are subsequent hits without a custom query string) you would need to create a session-based solution by persisting that value (via a cookie or localstorage) and pass it in to the Google Analytics tracking call e.g. as a hit-based custom dimension and use that for filtering.

ga('create', 'UA-XXXX-Y', 'auto');
// Set value for custom dimension at index 1.
ga('set', 'dimension1', myCookieVar);
// Send the custom dimension value with a pageview hit.
ga('send', 'pageview');

And the filter