Identifying test machines in analytics logs

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We're just beginning to add analytics to our SaaS application, to begin (among other things) billing clients based on usage. The problem we're running into is there's a few circumstances where our support team will simulate a log in into production to try to reproduce reported issues with a client's configuration. When they log in, an entry will be made into our analytics logs that their specific account has logged in, which we use to calculate billing.

A few ideas we had to solve this:

1) We log IP addresses as well as machine keys for each PC that logs in - we could filter out known IP addresses and/or machine keys belonging to support. The drawback is we have to maintain a list of keys / addresses manually.

2) If support (or anyone else internal) runs our application in debug mode (as opposed to release), it will not report analytics. This is fine, as long as support / anyone else remembers to switch to debug mode.

3) Include some sort of reg key / similar setting required to be set when configuring a production system in order to send analytics. Again, fine, as long as our infrastructure team remembers to set the reg key or setting.

All of these approaches require some sort of human involvement, which we all know can be iffy at best. Has anyone run into a similar situation? Is there an automated approach to this problem?

(PS> Of course, we shouldn't be testing in production, but there are a few one-off instances with customer set up that we can't reproduce without logging in as them in production. This is the only time we do so, and this is the case I'm talking about in this question.)

Posted 16-Nov-11 6:35am

Chad Emm

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DaveAuld · Answer 1 · 2011-11-16T08:18:00

There are browser add-ons for disabling GA. your support team could use them.

http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/how-to-disable-google-analytics.html[^]

Edit: Option 1 is the best I think. the filtering shouldn't be too difficult as your internal IPs should be easy to identify if you are running on private address space or all addressing internally appear on the application from a single Shared NAT gateway address.

Option 2 is also an option, and the support team just need to be educated to make sure it is part of the test procedures and they get it into their heads to switch

Option 3, i would avoid, involving more settings (particularly those that could be found and turned off by the customer).