How do I see a breakdown report of the user agents (browsers) that have logged into JIRA?

[Arya Abdian]

We are embarking on an upgrade to JIRA 5, and since support for Internet Explorer 7 has been pulled, we are trying to determine the impact. Our organisation is still using IE7 as the standard browser, but many users have switched to Firefox or Chrome of their own accord.

I want to be able to produce some kind of report that tells me what user agent/browser our jira users are using, so that we can contact them if they are using IE7 to see how willing they are to switch to another browser when accessing JIRA.

Any ideas? A JIRA plugin of some kind would be the ideal solution, that way it will work regardless of which servlet container we're using. Otherwise, it will need to be a solution that will work on Glassfish and Tomcat. If we don't come up with a solution I'll have to go with an Apache-based solution (which is a hassle because users are hitting our old JIRA directly on the servlet's HTTP listener).

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Arya Abdian · Accepted solution]

Here's what I ended up doing:

1. Create an iptables pre-routing nat rule to redirect traffic hitting the tomcat port (8080) to a port in use by Apache HTTP (8091, in this case)

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 8080 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8091

2. Configure Apache HTTP to listen on port 8091, with the appropriate mod_proxy directives:

Listen 8091
NameVirtualHost *:8091

<VirtualHost *:8091>
ServerName jira.domain
ServerAlias jira servername servername.domain

ErrorLog logs/jira-error.log
CustomLog logs/jira-access.log combined
LogLevel info

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/


</VirtualHost>

3. Use a tool like awstats to parse logs/jira-access.log.

Not the most amazing solution, but it's the best I could come up with. Hope this helps someone else out there.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm not sure that there is anything available that will log the "user agent" in Jira - that seems like a job for the web-server rather than the systems running behind it. Obviously, Apache and its kin will log it automatically as it's pretty much a core function for them, but if you're hitting your Glassfish/Tomcat server directly, then that's where you should be looking really, not in an app behind them. I suspect you'll struggle even if you do want to move this function into Jira - you'll end up having to persuade Tomcat/Glassfish to pass the information to Jira, and I'm sure it would be a lot more simple to configure them to log it to a file instead.

(Aside - you might want to point out to your organisation that they really should be in the final phases of moving to IE8, IE9, or ideally, proper browsers, right now. As IE7 is completely obsolete and barely supported by MS, let alone other apps)

[Arya Abdian]

Hi Nic,

Thanks for taking a look, appreciate it. I'm sure user-agent information is already being made available to the web application by the servlet as part of the J2EE spec, but I could be wrong. Obviously if it isn't being made available then I would have to go with a servlet-based solution.

As for upgrading to a newer version of IE, I'm not holding my breath ;-)

Arya