[ARCHIVED] How does using the Canvas skill for Alexa appear in page views?

[tdelillo]

I'm looking into a student's activity in Canvas, and I am scrutinizing the IP addresses in page views. Among them are small clusters of activity (4-5 page views) with an IP address that points to Amazon, in Ashburn VA. Has anyone run across this? It occurred to me that it COULD maybe be what happens when someone is using the Canvas skill with their Alexa-enabled device, but that's pure speculation.

[bneporadny]

Hi Tracey,

That is a very good question and one that I am interested in hearing the answer too.  I am going to share this over with the Canvas Developers‌ group as well to see if anyone there has had first hand experience with the Canvas skill on the #amazon alexa‌ device. 

[bdye]

If you don't get an answer, I'll test this tomorrow. I'm working on a presentation "Alexa meets Canvas" and this would fit in.

Brian

[bdye]

So I just got done testing this. I did this all from a student perspective, "Check grades".

Canvas marks the User Agent - Canvas Alexa 

When you download the Page Views the useragent is axios and directs to 54.172.111.148  .

Brian

[tdelillo]

Interesting! I've been digging into this more, and I noticed some other cases where the Amazon IPs are popping up. In at least two of those cases, it was absolutely NOT Alexa-related, and seemed to be occurring when LTI's were pinging our account. For example, I have an access token for a publisher that is tied to my admin account (I know, bad practice), and overnight last night that publisher was doing some sort of system check and the IP was consistently in the Amazon range. It's very weird. It probably just has something to do with AWS, but it bothers me that the page views activity is so... scattered.

[thebert]

Thanks for investigating further!!! 🙂 

I suspect that many instances of Canvas are on Amazon servers, somewhere in the world. So many have gone to Amazon Web Services over the years. I am not surprised that Amazon IP addresses are showing up in page views. I bet even some smaller ISPs (and Canvas LTIs) are using Amazon. Perhaps Amazon's web service is cheaper than creating one's own server farm.

I wonder too about the differing page views associated with Amazon that are recorded in Canvas. Perhaps this is a case of the path of least resistance over the internet. Aren't we really interested in page views to validate that the student viewed the page? The page view isn't accurate about where the student viewed the page, is it?

Just a couple of thoughts! 🙂 Please correct my understanding!!!