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Help Center/Analytics/Using session recording

Using session recording

Applies to: Kakapo Analytics·6 Min. Lesezeit

A recording captures how a session ran in the browser: a cleaned-up snapshot of the page and after that the timeline of mouse path, clicks, scrolling and changes to the page content. Because this costs a noticeable amount of storage, the module is switched off by default.

  1. In the sidebar under “Administration”, go to “Settings” and there to the “Session Recording” card.
  2. Switch on “Session Recording” and set “Recording rate (%)” to a value between 0 and 100; 0 means that nobody is recorded.
  3. Open the website while logged out so that a session is created at all — logged-in editors are exempt when the exclusion is switched on.
  4. Under “Analytics”, switch to “Sessions”; in the “Replay” column, “Play” starts the player.
  5. In the “Session Recordings” card, filter by date range, page, device and sorting and page through with “Back” and “Next”.
  6. With “Share link”, create an address that works even without logging in, and end it later with “Revoke sharing”.

What a recording contains

  • A serialized initial snapshot of the page, after that only changes
  • Mouse movement, clicks, scrolling and changes to the window size
  • Entries appear as dots the length of the field — no typed character leaves the browser
  • Password fields also stay masked; select fields transmit their value, because option texts are public page content
  • The player renders everything in a sandbox iframe without script execution; clicks do not carry over into the reproduction

Player, limits and retention

The player offers play and pause, a timeline and the speed steps 0.5×, 1×, 2× and 4×. If the closing segment is missing because the tab was closed abruptly, the recording stays playable and is marked as “incomplete”. Whether a session is recorded is decided by a hash of the session ID — the same session decides the same way on every page, so that no half recordings arise. At most the 60 most recent recordings are kept; incomplete ones without a closing segment are removed by the daily cleanup as soon as they are older than 24 hours. You delete everything at once under “Settings → Reset” with “Clear recordings”.

If a page shows real names or amounts in ordinary text, the input masking does not catch that. Via a filter you can pass an additional CSS selection whose text stays unrecognizable in the recording. Only administrators may share and delete.
kwpa_record_mask
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