ALUI/WCI SSO Login Sequence and Log Files

You can't trust your web server logs to tell you how many pages your portal users view. When logging in, especially under SSO, the login sequence generates several "GET /portal/server.pt " lines. I dug into this today, and the results may be helpful as you look to infer portal usage from log files.

Yesterday I turned to IIS logs to determine some usage patterns in the portals I work with where users can enter through two different SSO systems. I started my search by looking at how many times SSOLogin.aspx occurred for each SSO system (hosted on different servers). When the results appeared material, today I wondered whether the load for the systems are different. Do the users of one SSO system have a more engaged portal session?

First I counted simply "GET /portal/server.pt" in the log files, and I though one set of users had far more pages per session than did the other. However, I then realized that gateway images were returned by my search pattern, so I added a space: "GET /portal/server.pt " This made the traffic look much more similar.

But I still didn't know how many actual pages the user sees. What happens in the login sequence?

What I found was:

* It is hard to identify actual pages per visit because the IIS log sometimes shows 3 and sometimes 4 requests per login.
* A user's login generates three lines in the IIS log with "GET /<virtualdirectory>/server.pt/ "  when the user enters the portal through http(s)://<portalhost>/
* A user's login generates four lines in the IIS log with "GET /<virtualdirectory>/server.pt/ "  when the user enters the portal through http(s)://<portalhost>/<virtualdirectory>/server.pt

The login sequence as found in IIS logs looks similar to this:

1. The unidentified user enters without specifying the <virtualdirectory>/server.pt, then redirects to the SSO login
/ 

2. The SSO-authenticated user is redirected to the portal from the WSSO login
/portal/server.pt 

3. The SSO-authenticated user is directed to the portal's SSOLogin sequence to process the SSO token and become portal-authenticated
/portal/sso/SSOLogin.aspx 

4. The portal-authenticated user runs a login sequence to determine the proper home page behavior
/portal/server.pt open=space&name=Login&dljr= 

5. The user lands on the proper home page
/portal/server.pt/community/superstuff/204 

I hope that's helpful.