- Main Headings
Hits represent
the total number of requests made to the server during
the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).
Files represent
the total number of hits (requests) that actually
resulted in something being sent back to the user.
Not all hits will send data; for example, 404-Not Found
requests and requests for pages that are already
in the browser's cache would not be included.
Sites are
the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that
made requests to the server. Care should be taken
when using this metric for anything other than that.
Many users can appear to come from a single site,
and one user can appear to come from many IP addresses
so this metric should be used simply as a rough guage as to
the number of visitors to your server.
Visits occur
when some remote site makes a request for a page on
your server for the first time. As long as the same
site keeps making requests within a given timeout
period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit.
If the site makes a request to your server and the
length of time since the last request is greater
than the specified timeout period (default is
30 minutes), a new Visit is started and
counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will
trigger a visit, remote sites that link to graphic
and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the
visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.
Pages are
those URLs that would be considered the actual page
being requested, and not all of the individual items
that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips).
Some people call this metric page views or page
impressions, and set defaults to any URL that has
an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.
A KByte (KB)
is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). This measurement is used to show the amount
of data that was transfered between the server and
the remote machine, based on the data found in the
server log.
- Common
Definitions
A Site is
a remote machine that makes requests
to your server, and is based
on the remote machine's IP Address/Hostname.
URL -
Uniform Resource Locator. All
requests made to a web server
need to request something.
A URL is that something,
and represents an object somewhere
on your server that either is accessable
to the remote user, or results
in an error (ie: 404 - Not found).
URLs can be of any type (HTML,
Audio, Graphics, etc...).
Referrers are
those URLs that led a user to
your site or caused the browser
to request something from your
server. The vast majority of
requests are made from your own
URLs, since most HTML pages contain
links to other objects such as
graphics files. If one of your
HTML pages contains links to
10 graphic images, then each
request for the HTML page will
produce 10 more hits with the
referrer specified as the URL
of your own HTML page.
Search
Strings are obtained from
examining the referrer string
and looking for known patterns
from various search engines.
The search engines and the
patterns to look for can be
specified by the user within
a configuration file. The default
will catch most of the major
ones.
User
Agents are a fancy name
for browsers. Netscape,
Opera, Konqueror, etc. are
all User Agents, and
each reports itself in a unique
way to your server. Keep in
mind, however, that many browsers allow
the user to change its reported
name, so you might see some
obvious fake names in the listing.
Entry/Exit pages
are those pages that were the
first (Entry)
and the last (Exit) pages requested in a visit.
These pages are calculated using
the Visits logic above.
When a visit is first triggered,
the requested page is counted
as an Entry page, and
whatever the last requested URL
was is counted as an Exit page.
Countries are
determined based on the top
level domain of the requesting
site. This is somewhat questionable,
however, as there is no longer
as strong enforcement of domains
as there was in the past. A .COM
domain may reside in the US
or somewhere else. An .IL domain
may actually be in Isreal; however,
it may also be located in the
US or elsewhere. The most common
domains seen are .COM (US Commercial),
.NET (Network), .ORG (Non-profit
Organization) and .EDU (Educational).
A large percentage may also be
shown as Unresolved/Unknown,
since a fairly large percentage
of dialup and other customer
access points do not resolve
to a name and are left as an
IP address.
Response
Codes are defined as part
of the HTTP/1.1 protocol. These
codes are generated by the
web server and indicate the
completion status of each request
made to it.
