It's very important to maintain statistics of events pertaining
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
Apache writes the following logs:
- 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 responce 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, the system offers logfile analysis programs that parse log
files in various formats and produce usage statistics in HTML format
for viewing through a browser.
You can choose out of two logfile analyzers, Webalizer and
ModLogAn. For details on these programs please visit http://freshmeat.net/projects/modlogan/
and http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/.
If you are new to these 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. They are also
updated every 15 minutes. To see statistics reports, click the "view"
icon:
