by David Strom
(ran in Infoworld 2/3/97)
One of the most important duties of a webmaster is to look at his/her access logs. These logs tell all sorts of information: who is visiting your web site, where they go once they get there, and which web page sent them to you. Indeed, the webmaster should do more than look at the logs: ideally, s/he should react to these patterns and make continuous improvements to the web site, making popular pages easier to find, for example.
Almost every web server creates these logs more or less automatically. The trick is digging through this treasure trove of data and consolidating it in meaningful ways. There are several third-party programs that can accomplish this, including e.g.software's WebTrends (reviewed in Infoworld 9/2/96) and MarketWave's HitList. WebManage Technologies Inc.'s NetIntellect is a third, and while it has some nice features, overall I still prefer WebTrends: a far simpler program with a better user interface.
Log analysis tools aren't something that will be in your face every day -- you probably won't use them more than once or twice a month, so the user interface design is important. You want to run the software, process your logs, and produce reports as quickly as possible. NetIntellect comes with some interesting automation tools to schedule report processing and emailing them once done.
NetIntellect requires lots of computer resources to do its stuff: you'll need to boost the Control Panel/System/Performance/Virtual Memory setting to a minimum of 100 megabytes. You'll also want at least 32 megabytes of RAM and a 160 megahertz Pentium or better.
I had all sorts of trouble with the 1.1 production version of NetIntellect: it would crash my IBM NT Server because I didn't happen to have any printer installed, for example. The 2.0 beta version is better-behaved, but still sluggish: it took it the better part of a day to analyze a 6 megabyte log, something that took WebTrends less than an hour.
NetIntellect will need to get your web server access file, and it can grab it directly from your web site via a built-in file-transfer routine. That is a nice feature. After it is finished processing your files, you see a three-paned window that is the primary user interface of the product. The left-hand side is a complete listing of the various reports available, while the summary is presented in the top right corner with the details in the lower right. This is somewhat cumbersome, and I found myself moving the window borders around for various reports.
New to version 2.0 are essential features such as the ability to do reverse Domain Name Server lookups: this means that you can set your web server to record just the IP address and save the lookups for later, increasing overall performance in the process. Also new are the ability to decode O'Reilly log format files, and the ability to process log files that are created from multiple domains. These features have been found in competing products for some time.
The reports produced by NetIntellect come in all shapes and sizes: you can print out HTML versions, Word files, spreadsheet files of various formats, and when all else fails, comma-separated text. You can export them to paper, to disk files, or via MAPI-enabled email. That is more than its competitors and a nice set of choices. Realistically, you don't really need all of this -- once you settle on a single format, you'll probably stick to it. My choice is HTML: you can get your graphics and text in a single place, easy to read.
I had the printed 1.1 manual but found it mostly unnecessary -- everything you need to do is fairly self-evident from the menu choices.
My bottom line? Well, NetIntellect and WebTrends produced different summary reports of the same log file: they weren't even close on the overall number of hits, let alone on some of the summary statistics. Who was right? I don't know. But the time range of my log reported by NetIntellect wasn't accurate, and that might be the cause of some of the differences.
Price: $149
Platforms: Windows 95, Windows NT (3.51 or 4.0)
WebManage Technologies, Inc.White Plains, NY
914 697 7555
914 697 7556 fax
copyright 1997 Infoworld Publishing Co.