New Server Statistics software for www.uiowa.edu

The software

The new software is a program called analog, currently in version 2.0, written by Stephen Turner at Cambridge. The README file is a little long, but describes everything the program can do. And despite length of the documentation, the program is pretty easy to use. A local copy of the README can be found at http://www.uiowa.edu/stats/analog-readme.html. The home page for analog is http://www.analog.cx.

Why we're using it

Our primary motivation for switching to a new statistics program was that the wwwstat reports were getting unwieldy. Bugs in the program resulted in generation of duplicate references to requests (e.g. the "~" vs. "%7E" problem) and inconsistent reports. The statistics generated by analog provide reports that are more useful (with one or two exceptions), with more formatting options. There are also reports which weren't available under the old software. Analog also provides bar graphs on some reports as a useful visual aid.

Among the other improvements gained by switching to analog are:

More intelligent handling of log entries
Handles the "tilde problem", where requests with "~" and "%7E" are equivalent
Counts "pages" as well as "requests"
Supports configuration files

See the README for full details.

Another nice advantage of analog is that it's much faster than wwwstat, by at least one or two orders of magnitude. It can run in a few minutes a logfile that would take a couple hours with wwwstat.

Reports for www.uiowa.edu

The central server will be maintaining three types of statistics reports:

There will be monthly reports (going back to the start of operation), with most of what wwwstat reports have now, plus some additional reports. Find a monthly report at http://www.uiowa.edu/stats/stats-1997-01.html.
There will be yearly reports, which will be a shorter document summarizing the entire year. See a yearly report at http://www.uiowa.edu/stats/stats-1996.html.
There will be "per-user" reports, which will contain most of the same material as the monthly reports, but only for that user's document tree. Instead of a request report, however, each user report will have a link to the request report in the monthly statistics page. See a per-user report at http://www.uiowa.edu/its/wwwstats/current.html.

Where to find the new reports

The new analog statistics can be found at http://www.uiowa.edu/stats/, where the old statistics were kept. The old wwwstat statistics can still be found at http://www.uiowa.edu/stats/wwwstat/. However, all new statistics will be generated using analog.

The "per-user" reports can be found in each user's account, under the production/wwwstats directory. There will be an index file with a header and links to the reports for the current and previous months. The previous month's report will automatically be replaced when the month changes, and each night the current month's report will be updated with the previous day's data. The index is accessed by the URL http://www.uiowa.edu/~username/wwwstats/.

18 February 1997