lcrm.co.uk Web

This page shows our current traffic statistics. A script, known as a cron job (cron originating from the Greek chronos - meaning time), runs every hour and analyses an access log on the web site server. The statistical data is recorded and a pdf file is automatically created with the data and graphs.

Our web server uses a program called Awstats which integrates very well with our Apache web server. The features available allow us to measure individual web site traffic - which is more useful for our clients - and also server traffic and payloads - which is useful for hardware performance analysis. Basically we can monitor to see how popular certain websites are and whether our equipment is up to the job of hosting and serving web sites using certain hardware specifications. There are lots and lots of types of data that can be processed and the explanations below covers a small selection - with an explanation of the areas of interest to us. In addition to the standard installation of the awstats program, various plug ins have bee configured in order to provide advanced features. The plug ins include features such as:

• 'tool tips' - this feature provides brief explanations on the report page, to help inform the end-user of what the graphs and figures are representing/
• 'decodeutfkeys' - this feature helps to display the correct character codes when viewed in the various supported languages.
• 'GeoIP' - this is a great feature that provides global country tracking.
• 'user info' - this plug in records the logins of authenticated users, for example if a folder with certain sensitive data requires user authentication.
• 'host info' - this plug in provides a link in the report, that uses the recorded IP addresses of visiting guests, to show 'whois' type data.
• 'graph applet' - the 3D effect applied to graphs is generated using this plug in. Just adds a 3 dimensional effect to the statistical graphs.
• 'buildstaticpages' - this allows both html (web pages) and PDF files to be generated from the text log files. This was a bit tricky to configure and required various code libraries, which will be discussed in the form, but allows us to email weekly or monthly reports to our clients.

This section of the statistics reports presents a record of the number of unique visitors to the web site. Unique in this instance refers to the physical location of the visitor. It means that a visitor from one originating IP address came to the web site and viewed at least one page. As can be seen in Fig.1 the report provides a graphical display of the unique visitors. The results are shown in monthly intervals for the current year. Of course the numerical figures are also outlined in tabular form.

Fig.1

Number of Visitors

The second column presents statistical data relating to the number of visits to a web site during the previous 60 minutes. The users are not unique and could be a user returning, after having browsed away from the web site.

Pages

This feature records and presents the sum of all visitors for all visits a page of the web site. The figures here are representative of web page hits - that is HTML files.

Hits

This is similar in processing to the previous 'Pages' feature but generally has higher values as it records and presents the number of times a page, image or file is either downloaded or viewed.

Bandwidth

This represents the bandwidth that has been in used in the serving of the pages, images and files from the web site. Basically how much data has been transferred from the previous 'Hits' section.

Real-Time Example

As always it is just as good to provide an example as well as an explanation - so the link below is an example of a generated statistics report in PDF format. As mentioned above an hourly script reads the data from this web site and then Awstats generates the web pages and graphs. Then another application compiles the output to a PDF file ready for end use.