How to send captured traffic to your First Party Domain using Fullstory Relay

Fullstory supports deployments of Cloud Relay on AWS and GCP Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers. Using Terraform, customers are able to easily and confidently deploy a Relay environment tailored to their configuration. The steps for this process on either platform provider can be found here:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): https://registry.terraform.io/modules/fullstorydev/fullstory-cloud-relay/aws/
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP): https://registry.terraform.io/modules/fullstorydev/fullstory-cloud-relay/google/ 

Please contact support for questions on setting up Cloud Relay.

Now that you've deployed your Relay environment, scroll down to Configuring Your Website or Application for Data Capture to continue the setup process.

The Fullstory Relay is an open source project available on github at: https://github.com/fullstorydev/relay-core/

Full source is available for you to inspect and build, or you can install one of our pre-built docker images. To get started, first check out the Running Relay project page.

There are two ways to use the Relay: via a path prefix on your main domain or as a publicly accessible subdomain.

Using a Path Prefix

Using this method you’ll configure your load balancer to receive relay requests on a specific path off your main site url. For example, if your site root domain was https://your-company.com, you could route Relay traffic to https://your-company.com/fsrelay.

By using a path prefix, browser data capture traffic will connect only to your main site and no other hosts. This option offers a simplified experience to your users (all traffic to the same root domain), but may be a little harder to configure on the server side.

Using a Dedicated Subdomain

In this example, you register a publicly accessible subdomain off your site root domain to receive Relay traffic. For example, if your site root domain was https://your-company.com, you could register https://fsrelay.your-company.com.

Using the subdomain method has the advantage of not requiring special routing in your main site’s load balancer, but does mean that your users will be connecting to multiple subdomains off your site, which may have repercussions to how you configure your TLS certificates and other browser security measures like content security policies.

Configuring the Relay

The Fullstory Relay project is a generic solution to redirect any type of traffic to any endpoint, so to configure for Fullstory data capture requires some additional configuration through environment variables.

The Relay is configured through variables passed into your docker container, or statically defined in a .yaml file. Refer to Running Relay for more information about Relay parameters.

To use with Fullstory data capture, the Relay process (when run as a Docker container) requires the following environment variables to be configured. For RELAY_PORT, use the port number you configure when launching your docker container (8086 used as an example in this case):

RELAY_PORT=8086
TRAFFIC_RELAY_TARGET=https://rs.fullstory.com
TRAFFIC_RELAY_SPECIALS=^/s/ https://edge.fullstory.com/s/ ^/datalayer/ https://edge.fullstory.com/datalayer/ ^/echo https://services.fullstory.com/echo

If you’re using the path prefix method (see above) then you will also need these two values:

TRAFFIC_PATHS_MATCH=^/fsrelay/
TRAFFIC_PATHS_REPLACEMENT=/

Note that TRAFFIC_PATHS_MATCH should be set to the actual path you’ve specified off your root domain for the Fullstory Relay. For example, if your full URL was https://your-company.com/fsrelay, then you would set it like above: TRAFFIC_PATHS_MATCH=^/fsrelay/.

Nested paths will also work, for example https://your-company.com/apps/fullstory would be:

TRAFFIC_PATHS_MATCH=^/apps/fullstory/
TRAFFIC_PATHS_REPLACEMENT=/

For the Docker image you’ll want to pass these values in as environment variables, as described in the Running Relay document.

When using a Relay binary you should set the same environment variables in a shell script or using the configuration options of your service host.

Configuring Your Data Capture Snippet for Path Prefix

The typical method of deploying Relay is in a dedicated subdomain scenario. It may be more preferable to deploy Relay using a path prefix scenario, where paths that are prepended with a specific prefix (like /fsrelay) trigger system to rewrite the path and direct it to the Relay origin host.

If this is the case and you are using path prefix, then you should change two variables like so:

window['_fs_host'] = 'your-company.com/fsrelay';

window['_fs_script'] = 'your-company.com/fsrelay/s/fs.js';

Now that you've deployed your Relay environment, head back over to the main Relay setup page to walk through configuring your web snippet or mobile SDK.

With your Relay up and running, you will now need to update your Fullstory data capture snippet to send data capture traffic to the Relay. You may want to first read through the article How do I get Fullstory up and running?

Within your Fullstory snippet, you’ll find a parameter near the top called window['_fs_host'] like this:

If you’re using a path prefix (see above) then you should change two variables like so:

window['_fs_host'] = 'your-company.com/fsrelay';
window['_fs_script'] = 'your-company.com/fsrelay/s/fs.js';
window['_fs_app_host'] = 'app.fullstory.com';

If you're using a dedicated subdomain for the Relay then change the same variables but use these values (where fsrelay is replaced with whatever subdomain you choose to use):

window['_fs_host'] = 'relay.your-company.com';
window['_fs_script'] = 'relay.your-company.com/s/fs.js';
window['_fs_app_host'] = 'app.fullstory.com';

Note: The fsrelay.your-company.com endpoint must be world-accessible over https. Also, do not include the https:// or a final / in _fs_host.

If you'd like to install the browser SDK directly when using FS Relay (rather than the snippet), the parameters that we pass into the init should look as follows:

Fullstory.init({
orgId: environment.fullStoryOrg,
host: 'your-company.com/fsrelay',
script: 'your-company.com/fsrelay/s/fs.js'
})

Relay support is available starting in version 1.37.0 of the native mobile SDKs. See Getting Started with Android Data Capture and Getting Started with iOS Data Capture for how to configure your SDK version and perform other setup.

Configuring a Relay server for your mobile app will also apply to web view contents in the app.

Android Configuration

In the Fullstory Block of your app’s build.gradle add a serverUrl configuration with the value of your Relay server’s url. If you are using a path prefix, make sure to include that here.

fullstory {
    serverUrl ‘https://your.server.com/path’
    …
}

iOS Configuration

In the Fullstory Dictionary of your app’s Info.plist file add a ServerUrl configuration of type String with the value of your Relay server’s url. If you are using a path prefix, make sure to include that here.