Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Administrator
    · Introduction
    · Technical Overview
    · Installation
    · Configuration
    · Event Log Page
    · Configuration Page
    · Troubleshooting
  • User
  • Appendix
  • Technical Overview

    Internal and external logs
    LogView handles two types of logs; logs that LogView collects itself, one for each virtual server it is installed to, and log files in Common log format that are created in other ways and imported to LogView. The first kind contains the most information and can therefore be used to create more complex statistics. All logs that LogView creates are compressed to save disk space.

    Statistics groups
    Earlier in this manual, we mentioned the concept of statistics groups. Now is the time to dive deeper into this subject.

    A simple log analyzer might only collect separate statistics for a number of separate logs. This approach is not sufficient for large web sites with many different virtual and physical servers, however. On such sites there is a need to show statistics extracted from data merged from the logs of several different servers.

    LogView solves this problem by not performing the statistics calculations directly on the logs, but instead on statistics groups that in turn can be connected to several different logs. To find out the total number of accesses to all the servers on the site, the administrator just has to create a statistics group with all the logs, and enable the function group Site activity, which contains the function Hits, on that statistics group. How this is done will be covered later, in the Configuration section.

    Databases
    LogView keeps a database for each function enabled on each statistics group. In these databases, LogView stores information that has been extracted from the logs by the functions. For example, if the function Most common browser is enabled on a group, a database is created to store the number of hits per used browser type. Inside the databases, the data is divided into different tables per a time unit, most often per day or hour. In this way, when the user requests a specific kind of statistics for a specific group and time interval, LogView can easily get the information needed to calculate the statistics from the database.

    The update operation
    Once a day, once an hour, or when the administrator uses the Update command, see the Configuration section, LogView performs an update operation. This has effects on both logs and databases.

    All imported external logs are checked, and the last hour's hits are appended to a corresponding internal LogView log. The logs created by LogView itself are not affected, since they are updated automatically after every access to their virtual server.

    The databases of the statistics groups are updated with the data gathered during the last hour, making the new data visible in the statistics.