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HITS |
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Hits
represent the total number of requests made to the server
during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..). |
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FILES |
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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). |
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SITES |
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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. |
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VISITS |
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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. |
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PAGES |
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Pages
are those URLs 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. |
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KBytes |
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A
KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show
the amount of data that was transfered between the server
and the remote machine, based on the data found in the
server log. |
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Common
Definitions |
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A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to
your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname. |
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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...). |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Response
Codes are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol. These codes
are generated by the web server and indicate the completion
status of each request made to it.
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