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It's very important to maintain statistics of events concerning
the operation of your site. This is the fastest and the most
reliable source of feedback from your visitors to picture
the real state of things.
Collecting web statistics includes two basic stages:
- Writing logs;
- Analyzing logs to produce readable reports.
Writing Logs
Statistic logs are written by Apache in Unix accounts
and by IIS in Windows accounts.
- Error log - stores data about errors generated by the
server (e.g. Page Not Found error) or by your CGI scripts;
- Transfer log - stores combined data about every visit
to your site, including:
- Remote host IP (i.e. visitor's IP);
- Time of request (i.e. when visitor requested the page);
- First line of request;
- Error generated by request, if any;
- Size of message sent in response to the request;
- Referrer (i.e. from which page visitor was directed);
- Agent ID (i.e. type of browser or another agent and related
information, such as user's OS, etc.) ;
- Referrer log - stores the list of URLs from which visitors
are referred to your site; and
- Agent log - stores data about agents used to enter the
site -- such as browsers or any other Internet-based software
-- and all related data.
All logs are stored in user's log directory. You can view
them using telnet.
Analyzing Logs
The statistics collected in the log files is usually difficult
to work with. To obtain readable information from the statistical
data, you can use logfile analysis programs that parse
log files in various formats and produce usage statistics
in HTML format for viewing through a browser:
- ModLogAn
- a free package available only for Unix-based accounts.
- Webalizer
- a free package available both for Unix-based and Windows
based accounts.
If you are new to the first two programs and do not know which to
choose, we recommend using ModLogAn as a more enhanced and
dynamic product.
Enabling Statistics
Typically, log writing and analysis for your site is disabled
by default. To enable it, select Domain Info in the
user menu. If you have more than one domain, select the domain
for which you want it enabled:
When you come to the Edit Domain page, click the Edit
icon in the Web Service field:
On the web services page find the name of the resource you
would like to enable and click the OFF button on its
right. It will turn to ON:
To enable these changes, restart apache by clicking RESTART
at the top of the page:
Your log files will be created in about 15 minutes and
then updated once a day. To see statistics reports,
click the "view" icon:
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