Loupewire

Track and Skip

Two lists that decide what the tracker records at all. What Skip removes is gone for good, which is why the filter bar exists beside them.

Updated

Keep the noise out of a capture before it becomes a row: record only the requests you care about, or never record the ones you do not.

Track /v2/orders, then load the page: only the requests that match become rows.

Record only what you need

  1. Open Track in the toolbar, type part of the URL you care about, such as /v2/orders, and press Enter.
  2. Load or reload the page. Only requests matching a Track pattern become rows.
  3. To keep noise out instead, type it into Skip: a telemetry host, an ad network, a polling endpoint you already understand.

Track is an allow list: empty, it records everything; with one entry, it records only what matches. Skip is a deny list, and it wins when both match. How a pattern matches is the same for every list: see Patterns: one rule, four places.

Skip leaves no trace

A request Skip excluded has no row, no counter and nothing to recover, and removing the pattern afterwards does not bring it back. That is why the filter bar sits beside these lists: it only hides. Use Skip for noise you are sure about, and the filter while you are still looking.

The Skip popover holding the chip cdn.example.com, over a table of fifteen rows with no cdn request among them
One Skip entry: the two CDN requests were never recorded, and nothing here says so.

Keep a list for every window

Patterns typed in the tracker last as long as its window. Put the hosts you never want to see in Settings → Global patterns, and they apply to every tracker window from then on.

Common mistakes

  • One Track entry that excludes everything else. The redirect you were about to follow and the auth call you did not think about are gone too. Prefer Skip, or the filter.
  • Skipping the host you are debugging. example.com in Skip removes the API calls as well. Name the narrowest thing that is really noise.
  • Expecting Skip to hide rows you can get back. That is the filter. Skip is a decision not to record.

Not in this version

Regular expressions, wildcards and matching by HTTP method are planned, and so is a count of what the patterns excluded.