Forum OpenACS Q&A: awstats, user-tracking, views and openacs

Do you call awstats.pl in a cronjob once per night, right after logroll ?

Do you keep the access log in one file?

Which version of awstats are you using?

What is the default statistics that you usually gather?

Would it make sense to have an installation instructions for awstats and OpenACS?

How does the user-tracking come into play when using awstats?

As the user_id is tracked in the access.log, can we retrieve the following information easily (as in: has anybody done this already):

- Which users are most active?
- Which communities are the most active?

Additionally, depending on how the user-tracking package works, is this extendable so you could answer questions like:

- Which WIki page has been visited the most often.
- Which file was downloaded most often
- Which content_item has been viewed most for a certain content_type.

I would like not to use the views package, but maybe that would be the way to go, not sure though if it tracks the number of times a single user has looked at an object.

Quick question to the people using awstats out there. What setup are you using?

For SG since we are using Solaris zones, we have one central awstats installed and each web instance calls the same awstats with different .conf files each.

We also have a crude awstats-support package which takes care of most things like initial conf creation, scheduled procs to run, interface for basic edits of some conf variables, and probably some other stuff. I haven't really looked at user-tracking package. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that requires an edit on the access log format to insert the user_ids? Our awstats-support package doesn't really extend it as it doesn't do any user tracking just basic web stats.

Do you call awstats.pl in a cronjob once per night, right after logroll ?

Called via scheduled proc from the awstast-support package. Default install would assume that you logroll every night.

Do you keep the access log in one file?

No and not really advisable so that awstats.pl doesn't need to revisit parsed log entries.

Which version of awstats are you using?

Currently this one -- Advanced Web Statistics 6.5 (build 1.857). But its central so we only need to update it once everytime for all our zones.

What is the default statistics that you usually gather?

Usually default from the standard conf file + geo tracking with the GeoIP.pm module installed. I'm not sure if we already have GeoIP.pm now as we did some server transfers

Would it make sense to have an installation instructions for awstats and OpenACS?

The package is not complete but I can add it as documentation then have the package downloadable somewhere or added to HEAD if there's enough interest.