Configure environment-wide data privacy settings
Dynatrace can capture a lot of data from end-user monitoring environments. It's your responsibility to take precautions that protect your customers' private data.
We offer environment-wide settings that serve to ensure your compliance with the data privacy regulations of your region. For more fine-grained configuration, you can adjust the data privacy settings on the application level for your web and mobile apps.
To access the environment-wide data privacy settings
- From the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings > Preferences > Data privacy. The Data privacy page opens.
On this page, the following settings are available:
- Mask personal data in URIs
- Mask user actions (web applications only)
- Use persistent cookies for user tracking
- Data-collection and opt-in mode
- Comply with "Do Not Track" browser settings
- Mask end-user IP addresses and GPS coordinates (go to the IP Masking tab)
Unless otherwise stated, all settings on the Data privacy page apply to both the data captured from your end users' web browsers and the data captured by OneAgent on the server side.
Besides adjusting settings provided on the Data privacy page, you can also restrict the view access to personal information as well as mark some request attributes as confidential.
Mask personal data in URIs
🔴 Disabled by default
Dynatrace captures full URIs of requests that are sent from desktop and mobile browsers, as well as URIs of requests that are sent and received within monitored server-side processes. URIs may contain personal data, such as a user name, password, or ID.
When Mask personal data in URIs is turned on, Dynatrace detects personal data—emails, IBANs, payment card numbers, IP addresses, UUIDs, and other IDs—in URIs, query strings, headers, and exception messages and replaces this data with the <masked> string (for example, /url?country=Austria&city=Linz changes to /url?country=<masked>&city=<masked> and /account/iban('123456678890') changes to /account/iban('<masked>')). As a result, the personal data is then masked in the PurePath® analysis, error analysis, user action names for RUM, and elsewhere in Dynatrace.
Mask user actions
🔴 Disabled by default
The Mask user actions (web applications only) option affects Real User Monitoring only for web applications. With this option enabled, Dynatrace uses generic values for user action names.
When Dynatrace detects a user action that triggers a page load or an AJAX/XHR action, it constructs a name for the user action based on:
- User event type, for example,
click on...,loading of page..., orkeypress on... - Title, caption, label, value, ID, className, or other available property of the related HTML element, for example, an image, button, checkbox, or text input field
In most instances, the default approach to user action naming works well, resulting in user action names such as:
click on "Search" on page /search.htmlkeypress on "Feedback" on page /contact.htmltouch on "Homescreen" of page /list.jsf
In rare circumstances, email addresses, usernames, or other confidential data may be unintentionally included in user action names. This happens when confidential data is included in an HTML element label, attribute, or other value, resulting in user action names such as click on "My Account Number: 1231231". If such confidential data appears in your application's user action names, turn on Mask user actions (web applications only) . This setting replaces specific HTML element names and values with generic HTML element names.
With user action name masking enabled, the user action names listed above appear as:
click on INPUT on page /search.htmlkeypress on TEXTAREA on page /contact.htmltouch on DIV of page /list.jsf
To avoid capturing personal information for user actions in your mobile apps, check the information on mobile user action masking.
User tracking
🔴 Disabled by default
The Use persistent cookies for user tracking setting allows you to enable or disable the use of persistent cookies that detect and track returning users.
When turned on, Real User Monitoring sets a persistent cookie in end-user browsers that detects if the browser has been used previously to access your application. When turned off, Dynatrace is no longer able to correlate anonymous user sessions with tagged user sessions, so the Returning vs. new users RUM metric no longer works. Learn how we store this cookie.
User tracking is disabled by default for all newly created applications. Settings for existing applications aren't affected, so you must configure them manually.
Opt-in mode
🔴 Disabled by default
To provide your end users with the ability to decide for themselves if their activities should be tracked or not (this is called "cookie opt-out capability"), enable the opt-in mode.
Usually, Dynatrace creates tracking cookies automatically. When Data-collection and opt-in mode is turned on, RUM is disabled and no cookies are created. When an end user accepts your cookie policy, Dynatrace enables RUM and sets the tracking cookies.
Do Not Track
🟢 Enabled by default
Another technique for protecting end-user privacy is the "Do Not Track" feature. When a user enables this feature, their browser adds the DNT HTTP request header to all outgoing web requests. This header specifies that all user tracking must be disabled.
After you turn on Comply with "Do Not Track" browser settings, you can select between two options:
- Capture anonymous user sessions for "Do Not Track"-enabled browsers: When the
DNTheader is detected, Dynatrace captures RUM data but excludes all personal information that could lead to the identification of the user. The IP address is masked, and no user tag information is sent.With the User tracking setting enabled, Dynatrace still sets a persistent cookie to detect returning users.
- Turn Real User Monitoring off for "Do Not Track"-enabled browsers: When the
DNTheader is detected, Dynatrace doesn't capture any data from browsers that have the "Do Not Track" setting enabled.
If you turn off Comply with "Do Not Track" browser settings, Dynatrace ignores the browser's "Do Not Track" setting and the DNT header.
The Comply with "Do Not Track" browser settings — Capture anonymous user sessions for "Do Not Track"-enabled browsers option is enabled by default for all environments and applications.
Mask IPs and GPS coordinates
🟢 Enabled by default
Dynatrace captures IP addresses and GPS coordinates of end users to determine the region from which they access your application.
With the Mask end-user IP addresses and GPS coordinates option turned on, Dynatrace masks end user IP addresses and GPS coordinates during Real User Monitoring and server-side monitoring. The last octet of monitored IPv4 addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses are replaced with zeroes. GPS coordinates are rounded up to 1 decimal place (~10 km). The masking occurs within the application, monitored process, or browser so that the data is already masked before it's sent (data in transit) to the Dynatrace cluster. Location lookups are made using anonymized IP addresses and GPS coordinates.
The Mask end-user IP addresses and GPS coordinates — Mask all IP addresses option is enabled by default for new environments.
For mobile applications, Dynatrace uses the coordinates from the device by using GPS or Wi-Fi. If the application has the permission to use this geolocation information, Dynatrace uses it to calculate the city that is closest to the reported GPS location. If not, Dynatrace uses MaxMind Geo2 Database.
Restrict view access to personal data
Dynatrace automatically considers certain data points it captures as confidential and only displays them to users who have the View sensitive request data permission. All other users see that the data point exists, but the personal data is masked out with asterisks *****.
If your organization captures personal user data such as email addresses, IP addresses, or passwords in the course of monitoring, you should restrict view access to this personal data so that only authorized users can view it.
Also note that only users with the View sensitive request data permission can override data masking settings.
Personal data types
The following data types are considered confidential and are masked at display:
- Requests attributes marked as confidential
- Client IP addresses
- Exception messages
- URL query parameters
- HTTP headers
- HTTP POST parameters
- Original captured method argument values (the resulting request attribute is treated separately)
Mark request attributes as confidential
Request attributes are key-value pairs of metadata that are filterable across all Dynatrace service and distributed traces views.
Dynatrace allows you to decide whether a request attribute should be marked as confidential. To manage request attributes, you must have the Manage capturing of sensitive request data permission.