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Analog Web Page Statistics Explained

Analog is the new web page statistics tool for the ECN web servers. It is the replacement for pagecount on the machines that are running the Apache web server. Not only does Analog provide hit information, it provides an array of other interesting and useful data.

total number of hits

average hits per day

number of new hosts in past 7 days

total data transferred

list of top level domains visiting site

list of hosts visiting site

list of directories requested

list of referring URLs

To use Analog, your web pages must be on a host that is running the Apache web server. To select Analog, point your browser to the following URL (replacing machine_name with the name of the machine that serves your web pages).
http://machine_name.ecn.purdue.edu/tools/analog/

Using the above URL to run a query for the form:

1. Check the boxes for each report that is of interest. The most common reports are listed in this article.
2. In the Hit Filter field enter the number of days to include in the query.

   Example:

   from_date -7

   and

   to_date

3. In the Include Paths field enter the path of the directories of interest, i.e. for ECN use /ECN/* for all of the directories in ECN. The path to a particular file can also be be entered.
4. Change the Title and URL under the layout if desired.
5. Click on the submit button and wait for the results.

To see an example of Analog running on a personal web page that is on SHAY, point your browser to http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/tools/analog/. You should see the Analog form. Complete the form for the results you desire. In the Include Paths field enter /~your_login/* to see all the hits on your personal web page.

What Does All Of This Information Mean?

Daily Summary

The number of hits per day for each day of the week.

Daily Report

The number of hits for each day in the query.

Hourly Summary

Similar to a Daily Summary, it is the number of hits per hour for each hour of the day.

Hourly Report

Similar to the Daily Report, it lists the number of hits for every hour of every day in the query. Since there are 24 entries for each day, this report gets very long for queries of more than a couple of days.

Domain Report

A list of all the top level domains and the number of request from each domain. The top level domains include .com, .edu, .mil, .net, and .org and country codes, .au, .de, .fr, etc.

Host Report

A list indicating the number of requests by each host/IP address. This report can give you a general idea of who has visited your site.

Directory Report

This report shows how many times files in each directory have been requested.

Referrer Report

A listing of the URLs that were used to get to the pages in your site and how many times it was used. The referrer URLs are the pages that have links to your site. If you see a URL with a long query string at the end, it is possible that a page was found by someone using a search engine like Alta Vista or Excite.

For additional information, please see the original newsletter article by Kyler Laird at the following URL: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/ECN/Newsletters/ then select Summer 1997 and ECN Analog For Web Page Statistics.

Output Example

HTML