WebTrends Professional Suite

With so many Websites popping up, the traffic on the Internet

has gone up significantly. Therefore, Websites try everything possible to pull

in the maximum traffic. The number of hits for a Website are very important

because they can be used for generating business after analyzing various factors

like the most frequently visited pages and broken links. WebTrends Professional

Suite can come in handy for doing this analysis. It can be used by Web hosting

services, ISPs, e-commerce sites, or even large companies to keep track of their

Internet access.

WebTrends can analyze traffic for Web servers and proxy

servers. It can analyze links and has an alert monitor. To integrate the Suite

into your existing services, you need to create profiles. These are site

specific and you have to create multiple profiles for different sites. The

profile primarily contains the URL to the root of the Website (i.e., the default

homepage), the statistics to be included in the reports to be generated and the

path of the log files. Similar information is present in profiles for proxy

analysis and link analysis.

Systematic reports are generated and can be presented to the

administrator either in an HTML format, as an Excel sheet, in terms of graphs or

even as regular Notepad files. All reports are customizable, and can also be

scheduled.

Web server traffic analysis

WebTrends gives comprehensive information about your Website’s

health. This information can also be used for site management in terms of

detecting errors in links or Web pages. During installation, it can

automatically detect Microsoft IIS (3.0 and 4.0) or Netscape Web Server. Other

Web servers can be linked to it provided you know the path of their log files.

The statistics it can generate include most and least requested pages, most

accessed directories, most downloaded files and top entry requested. The last

piece of data is about the first page that a visitor requests upon reaching the

home page.

Proxy server analysis

Most corporate organizations use proxies for accessing the

Internet. To keep track of it, the proxy analysis feature comes handy. Once

linked to your proxy, it gives information about which Website has been accessed

by whom, i.e., the IP addresses of the users and the Website URLs. It also gives

you reports about most visited sites and top downloaded files by individuals on

your intranet. This can hence be deployed as an effective department management

tool. Just add the IP subnets of the various departments and reports will then

be generated department-wise. Here again the log files are used as the back-end

information source for the application.

Link analysis

This option can be used to check the integrity of links on

your Website. It checks and reports all kinds of links including HTTP, HTTPS,

FTP, Media player (ASX), mail-to, NNTP and Gopher links. HTML syntax problems

are also reported because such problems are parts of log files too.

Alert and monitoring

What if your basic connection to the Internet has gone down,

or your Web or mail server fails? The Alert and Monitoring options keeps tab on

your server connections over almost all protocols. Regular ping alerts or alerts

on SMTP can be set up. If the connection fails, audio and visual alerts can be

shown to the administrator.

All in all, it’s a great tool for giving you accurate usage

data, which can be used for future upgrades and enhancements for your Website or

intranet. At a price of Rs 49,950 it is surely worthwhile for a Web hosting

service or large networks.

Ashish Sharma with Sanjay Majumder at PCQ Labs