What Information Is Transmitted in a Page Load or Transaction Test?

ThousandEyes Cloud and Enterprise Agents transmit the following information when executing page load or transaction tests:

• HTTP request and response headers only. Response bodies are not sent.

• Also of note is that Authorization and Proxy-Authorization headers are masked. Cookies are masked as well.

• Waterfall data, including

  • Request and response headers for each waterfall object or component

  • Provider information is not sent by the ThousandEyes Agent, but is instead deduced by the back-end

  • IP addresses

• Screenshots are transmitted if a marker is present in the transaction test script or if a test error occurs. See Test Settings for Page Load and Transaction Tests for information on how to disable screenshots in these test types using the Browser Options on the Advanced Settings tab.

ThousandEyes users can review all data collected by visiting the Waterfall tab under Cloud & Enterprise Agents > Test Views, as described in Navigating Waterfall Charts for Page Load and Transaction Tests. Data that’s not directly used or displayed on the ThousandEyes platform is not collected.

Clicking on each component in the Waterfall shows:

• Element/component-specific URL

• HTTP method

• Target IP

• Response code

• Content type

• Protocol

Additional Notes

• The following additional considerations may be useful to keep in mind:

• Questions about user privacy and who can see Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are different from where the data itself resides, and what is retained on the back-end. For example, a Transaction test for a healthcare organization might access a patient name list and take a screenshot as part of a longer user journey. The screenshot action can be disabled for that test without impacting any other tests.

• Note that although the ThousandEyes agent receives body payloads as part of executing the test, it doesn’t preserve them. For example, when loading a page with an image, it has to download the image in order to time how long that download takes. However, the image file itself is stored in a temporary container that is destroyed when the test run completes.

• User credentials are not stored in the transaction test script itself, nor are they exposed in any test views or test settings available to ThousandEyes users. Instead they are stored and masked in a Credentials Repository as described in Working With Secure Credentials.

• For general information on data retention policies, see How Long Does ThousandEyes Retain Customer Data?