funnelwebcentral.org | faq

Settings

A. You need to create a set of virtual domain reports. To do this, simply click Settings > Virtual > Domains > Reporting > Identify Hosts by > Virtual Host. Process your log(s) with Funnel Web and it will automatically create a report for each of your customers.

A. Make sure you switch URL parameters on (in Settings > Analysis > Dynamic). Then set up a File/URL filter (Settings > Filters) that includes the parameter(s) you wish to track.

A. First, you must switch URL parameters on (in Settings > Analysis > Dynamic). Then, in Settings > Statistics > Global > URL parameter, enter "UserID=" (without the quotes). Your "Clients" and "Client Click Stream" reports will show the UserID's (or the IP address if a User ID doesn't exist).

A. To FTP from two servers, simply open the Scheduler, create a new schedule, edit its properties, and type your two URLs into separate lines of the Logs list.

Assign a settings file to the schedule, click OK, and then press "Run Now" - Funnel Web will pull the files off the two specified servers and generate a report in the location specified within your settings file.

A. If you are changing the format of your setting file while using the database at the same time, your results will be skewed. When you process log files into the database, the resulting (database) file contains processed statistics. This means that settings such as filters, date ranges, etc have already been used to perform the analysis and can not be changed without skewing the stats.

Once the database has been created the only further control you have over re-processing relates to report output, i.e. what reports to build and in what format (HTML, PDF, etc).

A. To produce a report where a range of visitor IP addresses appear in the Organization Groups report, see the example below:

Pattern: 216.94.235.(10-80) Name: 216.94.235 Group

In the example above, all visitors from the specified IP range will be reported in the Organizations report with the name specified. Wild cards on Visitor IP's may also be used.

A. Use the "1st Referral in Session" filter. This is the last filter in the drop-down list. Set it to "contains www.google.com".

A. Any file name type of setting will accept path tokens.

A. Content grouping (e.g. page1+page2+page3 = master frame 1) can be used to determine how many people saw the content of certain frames

A. Yes, just select "retain all URL parameters" in Settings --> Analysis --> Dynamic. With a set of filters, you can hone in on different data collected when users submit any forms via CGI (e.g. "product=24"). This will only be possible if the HTTP request is a "GET" and not a "POST". Without delving too deep into the topic, GET requests show the values submitted in a form (e.g. "file.cgi?product=24&country=6", are logged), as opposed to POST requests, which hide submission information (e.g. "file.cgi").

A. To change the first day appearing within the weekly traffic report, insert the "weekstartday" parameter into the Settings file. This parameter currently does not have GUI support but may do so in future versions of Analyzer. The range of possible values is: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 where 0 represents Sunday and 6 represents Saturday. The default value is 0.

For example, the entry:
weekstartday 1
will result in Monday appearing as the first day within the weekly traffic report.

The "weekstartday" parameter also affects the operation of the Week Before and This Week date range settings. For example if the parameter was set to 1, as above, then the This Week date range setting would process hits from Monday to Sunday of the current week.

Processing

A. Funnel Web simply takes the time between the first and last requests of a session to calculate the time online. Session length is also dependent on the Session Timeout value (Settings > Statistics > Global > Sessions). Assume that a user makes 5 requests in a session. If the timeout value is 10 minutes, and the user is idle for exactly 9 minutes between each request, the total time online will be calculated as 5 * 9 = 45 minutes. If the same user made 3 requests immediately, then clicked for two requests 20 minutes later, it would be regarded as two separate sessions.

A. There are two ways of setting up banner ads. First, they can be simple ".gif" or ".jpg" files that when clicked, go straight to the advertiser's site (i.e. the URL on the banner ad is a simple .com-type). This will not generate a statistic on your webserver's logfile because the link on the banner ad is on a different Web server altogether.

The other method is to set up the banner ads to be 'bounced' off a file on your own Web server. This file usually comes in the form of a ".cgi" or ".raw" file (on UNIX/Macintosh respectively), so when users click on a banner ad, it gets recorded as visiting a file on your Web server before redirecting to the target server. All you need to do, when setting up Funnel Web, is include a filter that only analyzes the file which bounces your banner ads. All graphs and statistics generated will reflect your banner ad's effectiveness.

For example, you could have a banner on your site linking to xyz.com - to track click-throughs. The IMG SRC of the banner would NOT be simply http://xyz.com/ but something like http://www.yoursite.com/ redirect.cgi?link=http://xyz.com/ or a http://www.yoursite.com/link_to_xyz.html containing a META tag redirect. In Funnel Web, your click string would be either "redirect.cgi?link=http://xyz.com" or "link_to_xyz.html," respectively.

A. There are two likely reasons: First, there is only one day's worth of log file data. The information in the daily report would be redundant, as it would echo the stats on the summary page. Second, there is no date information in the log file, making it impossible to generate date-based reports.

A. Funnel Web calculates sessions based on a "session timeout" value, which you specify in Settings > Statistics > Global. The program creates a separate area in its internal database for each unique visitor to a site. It then increments a counter every time the visitor returns, if at all. At the end of processing, it calculates unique visitors, total visitors, repeat visitors, etc, based on the data collected and incremented from the entire log file.

A. An invalid line usually occurs when web servers write out awkward information, "mis-write" a line so that there are only certain fields present, or perhaps even when long dynamic URLs corrupt lines due to non-standard characters. We have even seen HTML and JavaScript within some log files - these would obviously yield invalid lines.

A. Unique visitors refer to the total number of individual users who browsed through your site. These users may have visited your site once or 100 times, but this does not affect the calculation of unique visitors. It is a true indication of your site's popularity over a period of time. Funnel Web has an internal counter that keeps track of unique visitors. If a subsequent user matches one that's already in Funnel Web's database, it is not added, and thus retains its uniqueness.

A. Funnel Web requires the DATE, TIME, CLIENT, URL, STATUS, BYTES and HOSTNAME fields to be recorded in each line of the log file. Most web servers generate all of these fields by default. For more advanced statistical analysis the log file must provide additional fields.

If your web server supports extended log reporting, make sure it is configured to include AGENT and the REFERER fields in the log file. ese users may have visited your site once or 100 times, but this does not affect the calculation of unique visitors. It is a true indication of your site's popularity over a period of time. Funnel Web has an internal counter that keeps track of unique visitors. If a subsequent user matches one that's already in Funnel Web's database, it is not added, and thus retains its uniqueness.

A. Type 1, 2 and 3 errors are MAC memory related issues. (1, 2 and 3 are the severity levels) Apple recommends that you increase the memory on the application itself. Please do not increase the memory on Funnel Web Analyzer to more than around 25MB. Funnel Web Analyzer uses no more than 10Mb on the application itself and every single line that gets processed is then put up in cache memory. If you increase the physical memory for Funnel Web Analyzer then you are decreasing the physical memory for cache data. To resolve this issue, please turn on Virtual Memory and set it 3 times more than physical memory or as high as the system allows.

A. Yes, for example if a directory structure such as the following exists:

E:\Logs
-----Web site 1
-----Web site 2
------Etc.....

Just drag the whole E:\Logs folder into FunnelWeb. All logs within the subfolders (up to 3 levels deep) will be processed. This can be automated in the Schedule Properties windows by specifying E:\Logs (without an ending slash!) in the "Logs" field. This recursive processing only works on local machine paths (E:\Logs) as well as network paths (\\webserver\clients\logs).

Reporting

A. "Requests" refers to the number of hits generated as a result of visits from the referral site. "Pages" refers to the number of pages viewed as a result of visits from the referral site. "Sessions" refers to the number of sessions started by that particular referral site.

A. Your other domains aren't being recognized because Funnel Web ignores all non-mapped domains. You will need to map all of your domains to see across-the-log statistics.

A. The "Network" entry in the Countries report refers to clients with a ".net" suffix in their address.

A. You will need to switch on AGENT logging. Please refer to your web server documentation for step-by-step instructions on how to do this.

A. The reason it doesn't show the monthly graphs is because the date range (1 - 25 December) does not constitute a full month of analysis. As a result, Funnel Web does not write the Monthly graph.

A. Visitors total will NOT match the summary stats as a visitor may return on multiple days. The totals are cumulative and hence will be more.

A. Robots, also known as Spiders or Crawlers, are programs on the search engine server that scan the Internet for information to index. They crawl from web site to web site via hyperlinks. The collected data is automatically assessed for possible keywords and classified accordingly. When a site is submitted to a search engine the Robot automatically receives a command to visit this site and index the supplied information. The robot.txt file that you see is where these "Robots" access first in order to access the rest of your web site. This file also determines which robots may do what on a website and what they may not do. These accesses also count as visitors and sessions. If you do not want to see statistics for this file please filter it out.

A. Funnel Web resolves what it can by using your network environment. One thing that you can adjust in Funnel Web Analyzer to see if it helps is by going into Setting | Analysis | Network | and lower the simultaneous number. Reason being is that your DNS server might not be able to handle X amount of DNS queries at one time. If the above still fails, then take the unresolved IP address in the Demographics | Clients and run a manual dnslookup yourself. If the IP Address comes back as invalid then most likely it either has an incorrect "A record" or is not registered with InterNIC

A. Only errors relating to the pages displayed will be counted in the Pages report. Therefore the total number of errors in this report will be less than or equal to the total number of errors in the log file. (For example, the total would not include 404 errors on GIF's, assuming GIF's have not been defined as "pages" in the Extensions Tab). At the bottom of the Pages report, it will display a total like "666 of 777" which means that there were 777 errors in total, 666 of which were requests to pages displayed on this report.

If the totals on the two reports (Pages and Failed URL's) are the same, then this suggests that all errors were in fact to pages. Each error is included in both the Error column and the Requests column. So if Requests=6 and Errors=4, that means there was a total of 6 requests to this page, 2 of which succeeded and 4 of which failed.

A. This is a very subjective issue. FunnelWeb Analyzer assumes a default length of 30 seconds.

Database

A. If you want to export what is essentially aggregated report data to SQL Server, or any other RDBMS, then reprocess your database with Settings>Report>Output>Format set to "Comma Delimited". You may then import the resulting comma delimited data into the database of your choice. Please note that you may have to manually massage the comma delimited data a little before doing so.

If you want to export what is essentially raw log data featuring preserved log entries to SQL Server, or any other RDBMS, then you could utilise FunnelWeb's W3C conversion feature. Simply select the log(s) you wish to export and then click on the File menu command: "Convert log file to W3C Format". FunnelWeb will then export the data into a file called index.log that resides within your current report output folder as specified by Settings>Report>Output>Location. This file will contain the original log data in a tab delimited format which may be imported directly into an RDBMS.

Scheduling

A. Run the schedule with a settings file that has the following attributes:

-In Settings/Analysis/Options select Date Range of Last 7 days (runs report for days including current day) or last complete 7 days (runs report for last completed 7 days) -In Settings/Post Process/Compress select to Archive log to a .gz file and delete original log file

In the scheduler, link to the settings file above. In the log location, select the directory where all your logs are written by the web server, followed by *.log For example C:\Apache\logs\*.log

When the schedule is run, it will report on all log files from the past seven days regardless of name. Following processing the logs it will archive them to a .gz file. When the schedule is run a week later, it will ignore all the .gz files in the directory and only process the *.log files from the previous week which have not been zipped. It would be recommended to run the schedule after midnight with the "Last completed 7 days" option selected.

A. The scheduler can be used to FTP the logs from multiple locations:

1. Configure and save a settings file that does not contain any Pre-process FTP settings. 2. Open Scheduler, hit "New..", and select the settings file saved in the previous step. 4. In the "Logs" text box, enter as many FTP locations as is required, one per line. The following format should be used:

ftp://username:password@ftp.server.com/path_to_log_files/logfilename.log

A. When the NT Service scheduler processes logs. the NT service often does not have the same Access priveleges as the Funnel Web application. For this reason, reports uploaded to certain locations by the NT Schedule service may not be uploaded due to insufficient access priveliges. To change the access priveleges of the Funnel Web Scheduler NT Service, do the following:

1. Firstly, install the NT service if you haven't already via the FunnelWeb GUI (via Tools/Install Manual NTService and Start or Tools/Install Autostart NT Service and Start). Manual NT Service requires re-staring after re-boot of machine, wheras Autostart does not.

2.Right Click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and select Manage.

3.In the Computer Management Dialog that appears, select Services and Applications/Services from the tree.

4.In the right pane, you should see Funnel Web 4 - Scheduler listed

5.Right click on the Funnel Web 4 - Scheduler listing and select proprties. The Properties window for the Service will appear. Select the Log On tab of the Properties dialog. In the Log on Tab, select the "This Account" radio button and enter Log on name, as well as password to allow the Service to access the server you are uploading reports to. Save the changes by selecting OK

Doing this should enable you to upload reports to servers/drives that require a password

Command Line Operation

A. You have to add "|more" at the end of the command line.

Example:

analyzerent -nogui -l mylog.log -d c:\report\index.html |more

Also try:

analyzerent -nogui -h |more for additional options

Operating System

A. It has been tested on Windows XP and is fully supported in version 5.0

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