Slashdot Mirror
Webtrends - Reporting Site Usage and Other Stats?
gammoth asks: "My company has a successful web site which gets roughly 1,800,000 hits from 45,000 sessions a day. A few years ago, our web stats software, HitList, broke when we crossed it's capacity threshold (~1,000,000 hits). I replaced it with a tailored version of Webalizer supported by an array of perl scripts and a Suitespot server plugin. My reporting system runs with little intervention, managing log files from 4 hosts, and competently reports on hits, popular pages, referrers, etc. But it's not perfect and I'm the first to admit it doesn't provide the kind of info the marketing department would find really useful. I have plans of a comprehensive system using a DB and a report engine, but I've not had the time to implement it. (We're interested in info on marketing campaign success, path through site, etc). Meanwhile, marketing is tired of waiting and the otherwise exceptionally supportive IT management (truly) is considering contracting out some of our site usage reporting. Webtrends is being looked at seriously. I was wondering if any readers out there had had any experience with Webtrends or other software package or service provider. Are there any OS packages that provide features well beyond Webalizer?"
It's closed-source, commerical software, but I've been a big fan of NetTracker from Sane Solutions for a few years now.
I use it in an ISP environment, running with Apache logs on FreeBSD, and haven't had a problem with it yet. Plus, their support is outstanding.
It's one of the few pieces of closed-source software I have recommended. They have a demo version, so you can try it out on your logfiles and see if it works for you. But I highly recommend it.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Sane aside from being a happy customer
This story looks a lot like this ask slashdot.
To mænd sad i en tømmerflåde
I used WebTrends for several sites with about the same traffic you're looking at analyzing. In short, WebTrends sucks bigtime. It would crash for no reason almost everyday, and their dns resolver code is sloooooooow. I had to write a custom dns resolver that would replace all of the ip's with the hostnames in the logfiles before running it through webtrends. I've used both the Windows version, and the Linux Webtrends server. The windows version actually worked better, but it still sucked bigtime. Their customer support sucks too. A new version came out a week after I spent $2000 on their software, which was filled with bugs. The new version fixed most of the bugs, but they were going to make me buy it again to get the upgrade. Analog with Report Magic did the same things webtrends did, but it was free, and it worked much better.
Another package I've used is Accrue. I think this is by the same people that make HitList, but it's much better. It's not without it's problems, but it would work great for a site with the amount of traffic that you are analyzing. We didn't run into problems until trying to analyze more than 150 million hits/day. It has a sniffer that sits on your network and watches web traffic. It generates it's own logs which are more comprehensive than your webserver logs. Every hour, it uploads it's data to the "warehouse" box which analyzes it at the end of the day. It requires beefy hardware, big expensive Sun Enterprise systems. It has some nice marketing stats stuff, like path analysis, and other crap. Very expensive though, expect to spend 5 to 6 figures on the software, and another 5 to 6 figures on hardware. They purchased another company that did nearly the same thing about a year ago, and they have a new version based on the technology from the other company, version 6.0/6.1. I haven't used the new version, but supposedly it's much better. The price is still insane though, so unless this is something you really really need, I'd stay away. It also requires a good DBA who knows RedBrick or Oracle (you can use either for a database).
Another option is a managed log service like Digimine. They work well, but it's a recurring fee since it's a service, not software. And you have to upload your logs to them every day.
There's a company that's been hitting me up lately, I forget their name now. But they have a linux based version which has clustering capability. The database is stored compressed in chunks across the entire cluster. It scales linearly, so you can add machines as you need them. They've been taking business away from Digimine and Accrue. They are based in Minneapolis I think, but like I said, I forget their name now. Their software can correlate different logs together too, and get you stats on email campaign's, video streaming, and your webservers. If you're into spending money, this would likely be your best bet.
I would stay far far away from WebTrends if I were you. Webtrends is a sucky product, and you can get the same info with Analog and ReportMagic, for free, and with better performance. 1.8 million hits isn't really that much, so a product like Accrue would likely be overkill. And most companies balk at services since they can't depreciate the expenditure over time, it's an operating cost not a capital expense.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum