Key pages

Key pages divide a web application into relevant parts based on URL patterns. This way, you can gain insights on business-critical points of end-users journey by allowing you to:

Tag page view events, even if you disable URL collection for specific applications for privacy reasons. Upon detecting an event, Nexthink browser extension tags the page view or usage event with the pre-defined key pages.
Track the usage of different parts of an application, unlike URLs, which are not available on web.events table.
Indicate specific business operations when adequately defined. For some business applications such as Oracle NetSuite ERP or SAP S/4 HANA ERP, the URLs change according to the application functionality.
Provide insights into which pages are loaded for various business transactions, how often, and what their page load time is.
Filter the Applications dashboard based on specific key pages.

Discovering key pages by collecting URLs

Identifying key pages is systematically possible by enabling the Collect URLs option in the selected application's configuration page.

Refer to General tab documentation for more information about collecting URLs.

Once you activate the URL collection, you may:

Click on the Troubleshoot tab of the chosen application's dashboard page.
View the Key pages & URLs table to identify URLs with the most significant number of Frustrating page loads for end-users.

You can map these URLs into key pages as Nexthink displays them in descending order for page load times.

Defining key pages

To create a new key page from the application's configuration page:

Click the Key pages tab under Web configuration.
Click the Add key page button to open a popup window and fill in the fields:
- The Key page name can be composed of any standard safe character combination separated by a space, up to 100 characters long. It must be unique across an application.
- The Base URL pattern restricts key-page URLs to the application's URL patterns defined under the General tab. Therefore, key-page patterns can match more than one base application pattern.
- The Key page path extends the navigation URL path  (path  + query string + fragment) to detect the key page.
Click Save after all fields are defined.

When defining key pages, it's important to consider the following points:

The path pattern can contain any character allowed in URLs, as well as the wildcard character *.
The path pattern can contain more than one * wildcard.
Any wildcards * need to be specified. If you do not define the * as a prefix for the path, the system appends it to the application’s URL pattern without any *. See the examples below.
The same path pattern and application pattern name pair cannot appear more than once in the current application definition. As a workaround, select more than one application pattern for the given key page path.
The key page name needs to be unique per application.

Examples of Key page patterns

Key page path *page1*which belongs to the application URL pattern *://www.example.com/foo/*

This translates into *://www.example.com/foo/*page1*

Key page path page2 which belongs to the application URL pattern *://www.example.com/foo/*

This translates into *://www.example.com/foo/page2

Ordering key pages

You can overlap key page match patterns by following the appropriate order in the Nexthink web interface.

When reviewing a set of key pages, matching operations start at the top of the list and move towards the bottom to find a match. If the system finds a match, the process stops, and other patterns are not checked.

For example, the pattern /a/b/* should be listed above /a/*; otherwise a page /a/b/c would match /a/* and not /a/b/*. Below you can find an image with an explanation of the correct order:

In the example above, the ideal configuration would be the first option. In the second one, Outbound and Dispatch Shipment are tagged with the first key page, as it has a more generic tag.

To change the order of key pages from the application's configuration page:

Under the Key pages tab, hover an item from the list and open the action menu.
Click one of the possible options: Move up, Move down, Move to top, or Move to bottom.

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