Regarding Webalizer article

[Anon]

I am trying to use Webalizer to analuze my site stats. I find it pretty useless because there is no good documentation for the program. Specifically I need detailed explanations of what each statistic means and how it was derived. Anyone know of some Webalizer documentation out there?

[[deleted]]

what's so complex about hits/hour, pages/hours etc?

[Anon]

Sigh...........

Lets take a look at a line from my Webalizer stats (monthly summaries)........

Sites: 10381
Kbytes: 31397730
Visits: 24530
Pages: 87268
Files: 1928816
Hits: 4750083

Now lets look at 2 stats given by another program, Analog.

Distinct Hosts Served: 20,488
Pages: 867574

Now there is only one statistic in all of these numbers that makes sense to me. That is the pages as listed by analog. This is the TOTAL page views. Distinct hosts served? I have a feeling that this is a useful statistic but without knowing how this is derived I can't find the use in it. Can't find an explanation of this in Analogs documentation.

Back to the webalizer stats...... Pages are listed as 87,268. Why the huge difference? I suspect that this number is somehow calculated as a function of "pages" and "visits". But I don't know this for sure. And I have no idea how visits is derived due to the fact that webalizer has no documentation.

I don't find any of this very usefull without the documentation to explain the method behind the numbers.

[[deleted]]

sigh undeed.

Well, the lack of documentation is certainly a bad thing, but then again, is webalyzer a good thing in the first place?

Anyway, the stats are pretty self-explanatory if you know the meaning of the words. (google is a great help)

Sites: 10381
distinct hosts served

Kbytes: 31397730
total kbytes sent

Visits: 24530
Total number of 'sessions' from users, from when they first entered the site upto when they left for more than X minutes/hours

Pages: 87268
Total pages served

Files: 1928816
Total files served.

Hits: 4750083
Total requests made to the server.

[Anon]

Is "distinct hosts" distinct IP addresses? Obviously 87,268 is the number of pages served, but why the huge difference between this number and the number given by Analog? I know that number isnt the absolute munber of pages served because if we had 25k visits, I know for a fact that a lot of our members spend all day, every day on the site and are responsible for 1000's of pages each per month.

So yes, it may seem obvious what a page view or visit is, but when I need to talk to people about advertising or investing I find that I have very little information of use.

[[deleted]]

"Is "distinct hosts" distinct IP addresses"

most likely yes.

"but why the huge difference between this number and the number given by Analog"

could a a number of reasons. Analog may count hits instead of pages, webalyzer might fail to recognise some log entries...
Try a 'real' log analyzer like webtrends, and see what they come up with.