Web Server: Site Report

A Site Report displays web site access and error information. These reports are useful for determining:

• when and how frequently the web site is being visited
• how visitors found the web site
• who the visitors are (in a general sense)
• what problems, if any, visitors may have encountered on the site

Reports Types

Four types of reports are available:

• Activity: graphs of Sessions, Page hits, and URL hits for the selected Cycle and Period of time in the selected Format (see below for definitions)
• Errors: list of errors encountered by visitors accessing this web site. Includes error count for each error, and a separate list of URLs corresponding to the file(s) causing error(s)
• Referrers: list of web sites accessed immediately before each visitor followed a link to this site (if visitor followed a link to this site)
• Visitors: list of domain names (or IP addresses) for each visitor

Activity Definitions

The measures of activity reported are based on the following:

• Sessions: visits from unique IP addresses (unique users if files are password protected) during any given day. Multiple visits during a particular day from the same IP address are counted as a single Session
• Page hits: accesses to HTML files (does not count access to graphics files)
• URL hits: accesses to all files (counts access to graphics files)

Report Cycle/Periods

The Report Cycle and Report Period are actually two, subtly different parameters which can be used to gather unique, or period-dependent information. The period-dependent information may be useful in deriving trends.

The Report Cycle is the basic unit of time during which 'snapshots' of log file information are analyzed. The Cycle may be a day, week, month, or year.

The Report Period is the total amount of time covered by the report. The Period may be the same or greater than the Cycle. If the Period is the same as the Cycle, then one Cycle is reported in the Period (e.g. Today, Yesterday, Daily for one day, This Week, Last Week, Weekly for 1 week, etc.). If the Period is greater than the Cycle, then more than one Cycle is reported in the Period (e.g. Daily for 5 days, Monthly for 2 months).

The Report is always presented as one Cycle. In other words, if one of the 'Daily' options is chosen (Today, Yesterday, or a single day), then a report covering 24-hours is presented.

If the same value is used for the Cycle and Period, then unique information is presented for the stated interval of time (e.g. a particular day, a certain week, etc.).

If different values are used for the Cycle and Period, then merged information is presented for the stated interval of time. Merging is done by accumulating information from each Cycle in the Period and then displaying it according to the Report Format.

Report Format

The Report Format controls how information accumulated over more than one Cycle is reported. There are two options:

• Total: accumulated information is reported as a sum of values for each respective Cycle 'bucket' in the Period.
• Average: accumulated information is reported as the Total divided by the number of Cycles in the Period.

Total is useful for seeing the absolute amount of information occurring over all Cycles.

Average is useful for seeing the average amount of information occurring in one Cycle.