Monitoring your Websites log
Author: Vikas Kale
When you are hosting a website and it is slow to respond, potential customers will not wait and just go to a different website.
If the potential customer goes to a different website, it means you are losing business to some other competitor. Most marketing campaigns are measured on the number of hits you get on the website. For example, if you were getting 100 hits per day before you did your marketing campaign and you get 100 hits per day after the campaign, it means your marketing campaign was a total waste of resources and time.
IT departments constrained by time, budget and resource pressures, performing the intensive work of normalizing and mapping the log events and then meaningful event correlation can become too much of a burden. How do you gain the information and results of the website statistics within budget, time and without burden? The statistics includes
- Number of Visitors
- Most accessed pages
- Most accessed directories
- Search engines
- Search phrases
- Server errors
- Client side errors, etc
In this article, I will show how xFusion Studio helps Administrators to analyze these statistics in the most simplest manner.
Step1: Store log data in Database
As server holds log data only for a month to have free space on server, we can transfer the data into database to store it and delete the log files.
Step2: Most accessed pages/directories
Tablemetadata function can be used to view top five pages/directories in a single query.
Step3: Identify search engines
The column we are interested is csreferer. Using a predefined function Filter with the like option we can filter all the required search engines data.
Step4: Identify search phrases
The csReferer column also contains the search phrase information. Use xFusion function Split on the URL's to identify the search phrases.
Step5: Identify server errors
Create a Standard Query object in xFusion. The column we are interested is scstatus. The scstatus codes have different meaning for different errors like if it is more than 500 then it is defined as Server error. Hence we can rectify the error to increase the performance.
From the above statistics, now we can analyze the trafic to the site. We can also increase the performance of server by eliminating the server side and client side errors.
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