I noticed abnormal activity in my session usage. What steps do I take next?

Environment:

All Oracle B2C Service versions

Resolution:

For questions around what generates a session and how you can prevent inaccurate session billing on your site, please review Demystifying Session Usage (PDF). Some simple missteps in customization and configuration can increase billable sessions.

1. Agents should use the knowledge base from the agent desktop and not the end-user pages. Because the solution is designed for you to be able to review what agents view in the console vs. your end clients, if agents are using the end-user pages instead of the agent console, this will not only inflate sessions, but also cause answer views to be skewed.
2. For employees who do not have access to the agent desktop, contact your sales team about BUI (Browser User Interface) agents who could consume the knowledge base in a way that is less impactful financially, and who can also review the knowledge base without building sessions on the end-user pages through best practices.
3. Review your sessions and reporting regularly to spot anything out of the ordinary quickly. As session data is only retained for 30 days for tech support to investigate.
4. Review your session usage after any deployment change (listed in the Demystifying Session Usage PDF linked above). This is to ensure that changes to widgets or customizations do not increase session usage. This way you can fix the issue quickly and prevent additional charges.
5. If you feel there is an error after following all the best practices listed above and in the linked PDF, submit a ticket to support to investigate. When you submit that ticket, please provide all the details from the investigation you did (noted in the best practices document) and ensure that it is within a 30-day window of the issue occurring.
6. Support will provide you with a root cause of the issue. If you still feel after the root cause has been determined that you should not be charged for the sessions, please take the root cause we provide to you, to your sales team. Sales can review the sessions with you and negotiate if any changes need to be made to your charges and can work with their internal processes to get approvals.

• Understand that if you have configured your site in a way that increases session counts artificially resulting in additional charges these may not be refundable. 
• It is the responsibility of the customer and/or the site administrator(s) to configure the site responsibly and to be fully trained on the solution, and consult the documentation to understand default settings, configuration, customization work and how it could impact the site. The administrator(s) of the site are employees of your organization or in some cases could be delegated to a third-party provider such as a partner or Oracle Consulting.
• Bear in mind that you will need to work with that vendor to specify your requirements for the design you envision so it does not increase session counts.
• Should there be a request to safelist IP addresses to prevent them from creating billable sessions, you will need to contact your Sales Account Manager who will need to get the appropriate approvals from Oracle headquarters, as the solution is billed based on sessions and user seats. 

For more information, refer to the following resources:
Bots and Spiders Best Practices
Sessions, visits and hits explained