This article explains how to manage your exclude list to filter out non-production server traffic from your analytics. Filtering your traffic ensures your data remains accurate and reflects real visitor usage.

Understand the exclude list

Without an exclude list, traffic from your internal development, testing, and staging environments mixes with your live data. You can use the exclude list to block this unwanted traffic. Novus automates this process by analyzing your server data and creating rules to block non-production servers.

How Novus analyzes your traffic

When you run an analysis, Novus performs the following actions on your behalf:

• Queries your server traffic data from the last seven days.
• Evaluates and classifies each server as production, non-production, or uncertain.
• Generates exclusion patterns (such as localhost* or *.staging.*) for non-production servers.
• Automatically applies these patterns to your active exclusions.
• Sends a summary notification to your configured Slack channels.

Run a server traffic analysis

You can manually trigger Novus to analyze your server traffic and update your exclude list.

1. Go to Admin.
2. Under the App Settings section, select Exclude List.
3. Select Analyze in the top-right corner.

Novus begins analyzing your servers. You can monitor the progress and view completed analyses under the Recent Activity section.

Add a manual exclusion pattern

If you need to exclude a specific server that Novus didn't automatically detect, you can add it manually.

1. Go to Admin.
2. Under the App Settings section, select Exclude List.