Fides Documentation – Ethyca

Understanding monitor results

The website monitor provides a comprehensive view of the tracking technologies active on your website. After a scan is complete, the results are presented in the Action Center, organized by the monitor that detected the assets. Each monitor will have its own row in the action center.

After selecting the desired monitor in the action center, you’re brought to a table of all assets grouped by system/vendor. In this view you can add or ignore assets associated with a single system or bulk add/ignore multiple systems. Select a system to see a list of assets associated with that system.

For each detected asset (cookie, pixel, tag, JavaScript), the following information is provided:

Assets are categorized automatically using Fides Compass. If a system is not found in the Compass, it will be placed in the "Uncategorized Assets" group, requiring manual categorization.

Recent activity

After adding an asset to the system inventory, the asset will move out of the "Attention required" tab and over to the "Recent activity" tab. Note that the "Recent activity" tab shows the most recently added assets for this monitor across all systems.

Consolidated assets Permalink for this section

Many cookies, network requests, and subdomains carry a unique, dynamic identifier — a session ID, user ID, request hash, or similar. Left as-is, each of these would surface as a brand-new asset on every scan (for example, a different cookie for every visitor), flooding your results with effectively duplicate entries that all represent the same underlying technology.

To prevent this, the website monitor normalizes asset identifiers. It detects the dynamic portion of a cookie name, URL path, or subdomain and replaces it with an -id- placeholder. Assets that normalize to the same value are then rolled up into a single representative result — a consolidated, or wildcard, asset.

A few examples of how identifiers are normalized:

Detected values Consolidated asset
_ga_18MY9V5RLC, _ga_CWILS0SXPK _ga_-id-
cid_8f4d24c67aef4fc5abc7ddd590a3299e cid_-id-
https://js.hs-scripts.com/19834782.js https://js.hs-scripts.com/-id-.js
abc123.cdn.example.com -id-.cdn.example.com

The monitor only collapses the parts of an identifier that look machine-generated — UUIDs, long hexadecimal or alphanumeric tokens, and runs of digits — while leaving stable, human-meaningful names untouched (for example __Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN, eupubconsent-v2, and ordinary subdomains like www). A consolidated asset stands in for every concrete variant that was rolled up into it, so categorizing or adding the wildcard once covers all of them.

You can recognize a consolidated asset by the -id- placeholder in its name. Adding or ignoring it applies to every matching variant for that monitor — see Taking action on monitor results.

Upgrade handling Permalink for this section

Asset consolidation was introduced after some environments had already run scans, so you may have existing assets that were captured under their original, per-ID names (for example 100796X1589914.skimlinks.js). When the monitor is upgraded and the next scan reports the consolidated form instead (-id-.skimlinks.js), Fides automatically reconciles the older assets so you don't end up triaging the same technology under both its old and new names:

This cleanup happens automatically as scan results are ingested; no manual migration is required.