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 accessable to the remote user, or results in
an error (ie: 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio,
Graphics, etc...).
Referrers are
those URLs 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 URLs, 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 Isreal, 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 dialup 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.