Common Definitions
A Site is a remote machine that makes
requests to your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname.
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...).
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.
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.
Note: Only available if that information is contained in the
server logs.
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.
Note: Only available if that information is contained in the
server logs.
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.
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.
Response Codes are defined as part of the
HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC
2068; See Chapter 10). These codes are generated by the web server
and indicate the completion status of each request made to it.