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, such as 404-Not Found
requests and requests for pages that are already
in the browsers cache.
Tip: By looking at
the difference between hits and files, you can get
a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater
the difference between the two, the more people are
requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed
already).
Sites: is
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 they can also appear to come from many ip addresses
so it 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, remotes 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 URL's 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 defaults to any URL that has an extension
of .htm, .html or .cgi.
A KByte (KB)
is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount
of data that was transferred 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 machines
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 is accessible
to the remote user, or results in an error (ie: 404
- Not found). URL's can be of any type (HTML, Audio,
Graphics, etc...).
Referrers are those URL's that
lead 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 URL's, 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.
Note: Only available if that information
is contained in the server logs.
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 it's reported name,
so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.
Note: Only available if that information
is contained in the server logs.
Entry/Exit pages are those pages
that were the first requested in a visit (Entry),
and the last requested
(Exit). 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 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 Israel,
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,
as a fairly large percentage of dial up 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 (RFC 2068; See Chapter 10).
These
codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status
of each request made to it.
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