Hello,
This morning I received an e-mail notification from Piwik Pro that we had exceeded the monthly events, I checked the dashboard and was surprised to see more than 700,000 ‘Broken Events’ out of about 14,000 normal events.
I double checked the configuration of all our 5 sites we track with Piwik Pro and the configurations are correct… in the event tracking console there are no ‘broken’ events in the last 6 hours, what can I do?
best wishes,
Giorgio
Hi,
you could use the API to debug those events, but at this scale I would expect that to be some bot-made traffic.
You can start form here: GitHub - mbaersch/piwik-pro-broken-event-checker: GCP Cloud Function for checking Piwik PRO Debugger API for broken events and send debug info as Slack notification
best,
Markus
Hello Markus,
thank you very much for the suggestion! I just activated a service that sends me a Telegram alert by checking for broken events, it’s surely a BOT traffic, but if it’s not my services that triggers these requests, there is there a way to limit or exclude these events?
It’s a huge traffic and if it continues like this I can’t keep using Piwik Pro…
with very best wishes,
Giorgio
Hi,
I have no idea if that bot traffic directly hits the tracking endpoint for your instance (you could do nothing but try to hide the endpoint behind a proxy with some level of bot protection) or is just a side effect of bots rendering your web pages. In the second case (check your logs) you can actively try to fight that traffic: deny access to the pages, render a version with minimal content and without tracking codes, or whatever your admin can offer.
best,
Markus
I think it’s too late, tonight there were another 100k broken events and scanning all my site_ids from /api/tracker/v1/debugger I don’t see them linked to any site.
At this point my suspicion is that this is not even connected to the sites where piwik is installed, but is traffic generated in another way… and all I can do is deactivate piwik. Anyway thank you!
best wishes,
Giorgio
Hi,
that’s not good. Did you record any details about those broken events anywhere in the debugger or using the API? If not, the question remains why they appear in your account at all…?
best,
Markus
Hi Markus,
unfortunately no events are recorded in the API, I used your repository to check every hour for broken events in all sites and nothing is recorded. My suspicion is that something (a bot?) is sending traffic to my piwik but without the correct site_id… since 2 November they decided to suspend my account, but that huge traffic is not mine