With so many Websites popping up, the traffic on the Internet has gone up significantly. Therefore, Websites try everything possible to pull in the maximum traffic. The number of hits for a Website are very important because they can be used for generating business after analyzing various factors like the most frequently visited pages and broken links. WebTrends Professional Suite can come in handy for doing this analysis. It can be used by Web hosting services, ISPs, e-commerce sites, or even large companies to keep track of their Internet access.

WebTrends can analyze traffic for Web servers and proxy servers. It can analyze links and has an alert monitor. To integrate the Suite into your existing services, you need to create profiles. These are site specific and you have to create multiple profiles for different sites. The profile primarily contains the URL to the root of the Website (i.e., the default homepage), the statistics to be included in the reports to be generated and the path of the log files. Similar information is present in profiles for proxy analysis and link analysis.

Systematic reports are generated and can be presented to the administrator either in an HTML format, as an Excel sheet, in terms of graphs or even as regular Notepad files. All reports are customizable, and can also be scheduled.

Web server traffic analysis

WebTrends gives comprehensive information about your Website’s health. This information can also be used for site management in terms of detecting errors in links or Web pages. During installation, it can automatically detect Microsoft IIS (3.0 and 4.0) or Netscape Web Server. Other Web servers can be linked to it provided you know the path of their log files. The statistics it can generate include most and least requested pages, most accessed directories, most downloaded files and top entry requested. The last piece of data is about the first page that a visitor requests upon reaching the home page.

Proxy server analysis

Most corporate organizations use proxies for accessing the Internet. To keep track of it, the proxy analysis feature comes handy. Once linked to your proxy, it gives information about which Website has been accessed by whom, i.e., the IP addresses of the users and the Website URLs. It also gives you reports about most visited sites and top downloaded files by individuals on your intranet. This can hence be deployed as an effective department management tool. Just add the IP subnets of the various departments and reports will then be generated department-wise. Here again the log files are used as the back-end information source for the application.

Link analysis

This option can be used to check the integrity of links on your Website. It checks and reports all kinds of links including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Media player (ASX), mail-to, NNTP and Gopher links. HTML syntax problems are also reported because such problems are parts of log files too.

Alert and monitoring

What if your basic connection to the Internet has gone down, or your Web or mail server fails? The Alert and Monitoring options keeps tab on your server connections over almost all protocols. Regular ping alerts or alerts on SMTP can be set up. If the connection fails, audio and visual alerts can be shown to the administrator.

All in all, it’s a great tool for giving you accurate usage data, which can be used for future upgrades and enhancements for your Website or intranet. At a price of Rs 49,950 it is surely worthwhile for a Web hosting service or large networks.

Ashish Sharma with Sanjay Majumder at PCQ Labs