Redirect handled analytics callback

[a60915]

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

We do not have visibility into analytics related to redirects. When was the last time that redirect was hit? How often are they being hit? What is the referral for that redirect?

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally, we would provide an async callback in the Redirect Proxy configuration. This callback would be called when a redirect is handled, with the Next Request that generated the redirect and information about the redirect. We would want to know the Sitecore item name and the redirect type.

Is there a way to achieve this functionality with exisiting tools?

No response

Additional information

No response

[mjarosch]

Created a PR of a simple POC here: #421

[art-alexeyenko]

@a60915 thank you for the suggestion! And thank you for the PR. I've added it to our backlog for further triage.
The PR approach is solid, and there's also one that can be implemented without changes to the nextjs package.

The proxy architecture is intentionally pluggable, There could be an additional proxy plugin added after redirects. It can then read all the relevant data from NextRequest and NextResponse objects:

• incoming path from req
• status (redirect type), target path from res
• the data can be sent for tracking purposes

[mjarosch]

How would a follow up proxy know that there was a redirect? Does the response allow us to read the status code and determine off of that?

This would be a workable solution, but one of the limitations would be that we would be collecting details about all redirects, not just "sitecore redrects". Since it would be a custom proxy being added, we could create filters if needed.

Our use case for this is for tracking usage rates of redirects defined in Sitecore. Ideally, we would include additional information about the redirect, like the id or item path, so that we could correlate between the two systems. This is useful for regular cleaning of the redirect list. I didn't include expanding the data payload in my POC to keep it simple.

Would it be better or possible for the redirect proxy to add those details to the response header for the downstream reporting proxy to pick up? Similar to how the rewrite proxy does for the path?

[sc-nikolaoslazaridis]

Hello @a60915 @mjarosch, once again thank you for your contribution.
You can find the implementation for the new feature and an example here: #490
If you have any further feedback feel free to use this discussion.