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ECN Analog For Web Page Statistics

Along with the introduction of our new HTTP server, Apache, ECN is introducing a new Web page statistics program, Analog. Analog is a replacement for the current statistics gathering tool, Pagecount.

Pagecount was created to satisfy the user need for estimates of how often individual Web pages were being viewed. In order to function, Pagecount required installation as part of every page being counted. This application was a good first generation statistics program; however, it did not offer enough information to please many users and all too frequently malfunctioned, resulting in total data loss.

Analog was created at the University of Cambridge Statistical Laboratory by Stephen Turner. Its HTTP (Web) interface has been modified for use on the Engineering network so that Netscape upgraded to Version 3.0,3.01 can easily handle long-term log analysis.

Differences

• There is no setup for basic Analog usage. As soon as your HTTP server is running Apache, the statistics concerning page use are gathered.
• Access statistics about collections of pages can be analyzed in a single query to Analog. Pagecount required logs for individual pages. With Analog, complex queries can be made.
• There's more information available. Analog analyzes the entire line from the log file for each access. You can now see, for example, which pages referred users to your pages.
• Analog's data files are simple compressed text which are easily manipulated. Instead of the single large files of Pagecount, Analog uses gzipped text files to store the HTTP server logs. Each file holds all of the entries for a single day. This allows efficient access to the log entries of interest, and it simplifies "trimming" of old logs.
• Analog's data can be stored centrally or in a user-chosen location. Each host will store its archived logs for a limited time period. Storage life of this data is dependent on the available space and the level of HTTP activity. If you only need to look at access statistics for the past week, you will probably never need to store any of your own data.

Queries

Report Choices

In the directory report, for example, you can set the depth to which the report will print. If you would like an overview of which sections are getting the most "hits," choose a low number like 1 or 2. If you want to see specifically which directories are getting hit, choose a higher number.

Hit Filter

The "from date" and "to date" accepts dates of the form "19970428" (YYYYMMDD) and also relative dates such as "-7" (for "one week ago"). To analyze last week's data, use a "from date" of "-7" and a "to date" of "-1" .

The log archive directory is used to specify the location of archived log files. It will be explained more in a later ECN newsletter.

The include paths and exclude paths fields are used to narrow the scope of the analysis based on the path to the documents (the URLs). To see statistics for a single user, "me", set the include path to "/~me/*" and leave the exclude path blank. To eliminate a directory, icons, set the exclude path to "*/icons/*" . For statistics about a single document, like the index file for a research project, set the include path to "/~me/research/" . Multiple paths may be given for each field using comma-separated lists.

Layout

Usage

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