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SML Traffic Report
© Sean Copland 2007
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The great thing about raw log files is that they're freely created by the web server, and tell you everything you need to know about who's visiting, where they're coming from, and what pages they're viewing. All without you having to insert any code at all into your pages, and with it, redesigning your entire site.
The bad thing about them is that they don't make much sense if you've ever tried to sit down and read them...
The SML Traffic Report script is a clever tool, that extracts all the data you request from your raw log files, presenting it an an easy to read format so you can see (amongst other things) exactly where your visitors are coming from, and what files they're downloading.
Sample Log File
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As can be seen, the above screenshot tells us there where 25750 requests from 2000 visitors including everything from favicons, robots, and requests for missing pages, etc.
Extracting Visitor Page Views
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SML Traffic Report can easily weed out the information we don't want, as can be seen in the above screenshot, to generate a report of pageviews made by real people, we simply type in the files we want to ignore in the file box, in this case, "gif ico jpg jpeg png bmp txt" (each entry on a new line) and make sure we select the corresponding "minus" option to tell the script we want to remove them, and the "right arrow" to tell the script we want to remove files that end in the above mentioned search terms.
Then we type "200" into the code box, along with the corresponding "plus" option to tell the script to ignore error codes, and "HTTP/1.1" along with the corresponding "plus" option in the format box to ignore requests from searchbots, remembering to keep the search options for both as "=" for exact matches, then we type in the name of the outfile we want to save the report to, select the process option, and click report...
Genuine Pageviews Extracted
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We can see that we've had 10443 genuine page views from 546 genuine visitors. But that's just the start...
We can also drill down within the log file to extract individual ip numbers, and track their journey throughout the entire site. Essential if you wish to track where your sign ups are coming from, and were best to spend your advertising budget.
Tracking IP Numbers
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Simply by clicking on the desired ip number, or typing the ip number in the ip box and selecting the corresponding "plus" option, and typing the name of the outfile we wish to save the results to, we can generate a report based on all requests made by that ip, by selecting "process" and clicking report.
Reports can be generated based upon all the information within the log files, including dates and times, ip numbers, remote logins, authenticated users, request methods and formats, response codes, file names, sizes, referers, user agents, and any mixture thereof.
The script works under any Windows, Unix, Linux platform running Perl 5 or higher, and deals with any web server that generates raw log files in either the standard 'Common Log' Format or the 'Extended Common Log' Format with automatic detection of the two.
This version of the software can be run from either the command line, or as a CGI script, and is sold on a per domain basis, so if you want to run it on two different sites, you'll need to buy two copies of it.
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