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 Professional Suite |
Monitoring Utility: Rs 49,950 Features: Does both Web and intranet traffic analysis; checks for broken links and features alerts. Pros: Simple and user-friendly interface; comprehensive but simple to understand reports. Cons: None. Source: Summit Data Products, D-5, Green Park New Delhi 110016 Tel: 6517994-8 Fax: 6854711 E-mail: sdhuria@summitindia.com |
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