Zones Guide

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Zones allow you to easily categorize traffic generated by your tests into broad groupings based on the names/IPs of the hosts serving the content. For example, you can use zones to distinguish primary content served directly from your servers, content from 3rd party hosts, and CDN-distributed content. When analyzing your test data, you can easily breakdown/filter by zone to compare performance.

Configuring Zones

  1. Navigate to the Settings module and select Zones.
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  2. Click Create to set up a new zone, or click an existing Zone to configure its properties
  3. Give the Zone a Name, and optionally a description
  4. Add one or more Zone Rules, which tell Catchpoint how to identify traffic that belongs to the zone. For each Zone Rule, configure the following:
    1. Name - a name for this rule
    2. Based on - specifies whether catchpoint will look at the Request URL or the Initiator URL when applying the rule
    3. Match - choose whether the rule should match the Host name, Host name + path, URL, or IP
    4. Regex - select if using a regular expression for the rule
    5. Case Insensitive - select to ignore capital vs lower-case. (e.g. "Catchpoint" and "catchpoint" are treated the same if enabled.)
    6. Criteria - the literal string or regex that must be matched.

Zone Rule Examples

  • Match all the requests sent to ad.doubleclick.net:

    • Match: HOST
    • Criteria: ad.doubleclick.net

  • Match all the request sent to any sub-domain of "doubleclick.net":

    • Match: HOST
    • Regex
    • Case Insensitive
    • Criteria: .*\.doubleclick\.net

  • Match any requests to "ad.doubleclick.net/adj/..." :

    • Match: URL
    • Regex
    • Case Insensitive
    • Criteria: .*\.doubleclick\.net/adj/.*

  • Match anything but "www.amazon.com":

    • Match: HOST
    • Regex
    • Case Insensitive
    • Criteria: ^((?!(www.amazon.com)).)*$

For more on regex rules when creating Zones, please consult this knowledge base article.

Enable Zone Data Collection for a Test

You can enable Zone Data collection at the Product, Folder, or Test level under Advanced Settings.
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Zone Data Analysis

Once enabled, you can view your Zone data in Explorer by choosing Zones under Column By or Breakdown By. (Zone enablement isn't retroactive, so it is necessary to wait for future test runs with Zones enabled).