WebTrends, now in its fifth major release, was one of the first commercial log analysis packages, and has grown in power over the years. This latest version makes it easier to find the data you need, with new customizable dashboard views and reports, along with sophisticated features like scenario analysis.
WebTrends Reporting Center gives you a host of options for analyzing logs from Web or streaming media servers, either on a single machine or a cluster. You don't need to add special tags to your pages to analyze them—WebTrends imports and processes standard server logs. And it's an enterprise-class tool—it has no problem keeping up with large sites that get more than a million visitors a day.
|
At a Glance |
|
| WebTrends Reporting Center 5.0, Enterprise Edition | |
|---|---|
| Rating |  |
| Company | NetIQ |
| URL | www.netiq.com |
| Price | $10,500 |
| Platforms | Runs on Windows NT/2000/XP; Solaris 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8; and Red Hat Linux 6.2 or above. |
| Pros | Wide range of canned reports, with the ability to customize and create new ones. Support for tracking e-commerce transactions. |
| Cons | As a complex product, requires time and effort to customize features to your site's best advantage. High price tag. |
Specifying log files is a flexible process that lets you follow your existing log naming conventions. It also lets you find files on a local or UNC directory, or via FTP, and import them according to a schedule you specify. After you install the product and specify a file location, WebTrends analyzes the log and presents the information it gleans in a browser window. (I had no trouble using either Internet Explorer 6.0 or Netscape Communicator 4.08, but Opera 6.04 couldn't handle the necessary authentication.) Depending on the size of your log files, the processing can take hours; more memory and faster processors on your hardware can help. On my system, a 2GHz Pentium 4 with 768MB of RAM, the entire process of creating a profile, reading a week's worth of log data from a 10MB file, analyzing it, and saving the information to the software's internal on-demand reporting database took around nine minutes. On a workstation with more memory, the company says, WebTrends can process as much as 90GB of log data per day.
Once the processing is complete, you can view information by day, week, month, quarter, or year. You can't specify a custom time interval—defining, for example, that a day begins and ends at 6 a.m.—though you can specify which day begins a week.
WebTrends' capabilities go far beyond looking at page views, browser platforms, and similar basics. In addition to an overview screen that shows some basic information about visits, page views, and hits in both tabular and graphical formats, you can view specialized dashboards for commerce, marketing, visitor, page, navigation, technical, activity, and browser information, as well as several detailed reports within each of those sections. You can track visitor sessions by IP address, cookie, or authenticated username, among other methods.
If there's a certain path you want to monitor, such as a checkout process, you can use the scenario analysis feature to define the steps in the process. You can then create a report showing at which steps visitors abandoned the process.
One feature that I especially liked was the ability to analyze dynamic Web sites by associating dynamically created pages with the parameters used to create them, such as a product ID, number, or color. You can even specify translation tables so you can generate reports based on a product name instead of a cryptic ID number.
Also, you can define how you look at your log data. Include and exclude filters let you zero in on the exact information you want to see. You can create content groups—pages related in some way—by specifying an expression that defines a common pattern in their URLs—for instance, all URLs with "search" in them—then report on the group as a whole. And you can run comparative reports, showing information from two comparable time periods on the same page in both graphical and tabular form—useful for assessing the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, for example.
One advanced feature should be particularly appealing to sites that host multiple domains on a single host. A domain profile generator can parse a log file and split it into smaller files based on the domains or URLs it encounters. The resulting files can then be analyzed by the proper domain administrator.
WebTrends Reporting Center comes with more than ninety report screens. In addition to viewing information on screen, you can export report information to Microsoft Word or Excel via an ActiveX document utility. If can't find exactly the statistics you need in one place, WebTrends lets administrators create custom reports that can be made available to all users.
Installation is simple but not intuitive—you need to read the manual. We ran the product as a service on a Windows XP workstation. Only one workstation user needs administrative rights; you can let less privileged users run predefined reports. Every user must log on with a Windows user ID and password before viewing any information, making it easy to enforce security rules.
WebTrends Reporting Center's spiral-bound Administrator's Guide and online help are both clear and well-written, though more examples would help.
WebTrends Reporting Center, Enterprise Edition, starts at $10,500 per CPU. It's worth its high price tag for commerce organizations that can change their sites based on the information the software uncovers. For example, if you discover that most of your visitors are using Internet Explorer (as the overwhelming majority of ours were) and your pages are optimized for a different browser, you may be able to redesign to take advantage of IE features (without breaking pages for other visitors). If most of the visitors coming to your site from search engines are coming from obscure sites but not traffic leaders like Google (or vice versa), you might decide that you need to pay for premier placement to boost your presence. If many customers abandon their shopping carts at a certain screen, maybe you can rearchitect the purchasing process.
Sites on a budget can use WebTrends Reporting Center, eBusiness Edition, priced starting at $3,500 per CPU, which lacks custom reports and dashboards, comparative reporting, and scenario analysis.
WebTrends Reporting Center ranks among the best log reporting tools. It is powerful enough to handle in-depth analysis, yet simple enough that front-line business managers can get useful information from it too.
Lee (www.schlesinger.us), a freelance writer and editor, produces Lee Schlesinger's IT Digest.
