Enable Session Replay for web applications

This page describes the prerequisites and the procedure for enabling Session Replay.

Prerequisites

Ensure that your system meets the following requirements:

  • OneAgent version 1.241+ on all monitored hosts in your environment
  • Real User Monitoring enabled for your application
  • An active Dynatrace Digital Experience Monitoring license
  • Firewalls configured to allow application/octet-stream content coming from your application (some beacons sent by Session Replay are binary)
  • The web UI URL has a trusted certificate
  • Frontend Agents - Improved server node balancing turned on in Settings > Preferences > OneAgent features
  • A secondary disk configured to store user session data

You must store the Session Replay data in a different volume, known as the secondary disk. Therefore, every node in the cluster must have such a volume allocated to it.

Most sessions are estimated to be around 500 kB, the default data retention period is 35 days, and it is always good to have some buffer. Using these estimates, Dynatrace recommends that you calculate the secondary storage size by applying the following formula:

Storage size =
Sessions per day × Average session size (500 kB) × Percentage of sessions to record × Retention period (35) × Buffer (1.5)

To configure the secondary disk

  1. Mount the directory outside the transaction store. The transaction store and Session Replay folders must not be nested but parallel. For example, if the transaction directory resides at /mnt1/dynatrace/transaction, the session_replay directory should reside at /mnt2/dynatrace/session_replay.
  2. Assign the ownership of the directory to the dynatrace:dynatrace user.
  3. Set the value of the SERVER_REPLAY_DATASTORE_PATH property in the /etc/dynatrace.conf file to the directory you mounted in Step 1. For example, SERVER_REPLAY_DATASTORE_PATH = /mnt2/dynatrace/session_replay.
  4. Launch the reconfiguration sequentially on every node with your reconfigure.sh file. The path of this file depends on the environment. An example command is [Path]/dynatrace/install/dynatrace-managed/installer/reconfigure.sh.

Dynatrace Managed is reconfigured and restarted. Upon restart, the new Session Replay storage location is used.

Turn on Session Replay

To enable Session Replay

  1. Go to Web.
  2. Select the application that you want to configure.
  3. In the upper-right corner of the application overview page, select More (…) > Edit.
  4. From the application settings, select General settings > Enablement and cost control.
  5. Turn on Enable Session Replay.

After you've enabled Session Replay, it's time to configure it.

No additional configuration is required to set up agentless monitoring.

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