Interpreting the Reports of Wusage

To see the results of running wusage, open the index.html (or index.htm) file in the report directory with your favorite web browser. This filename can be changed using the indexname configuration file option. If you are producing summary reports, open the summary.html (or summary.htm) file instead.

Interpreting Daily, Weekly and Monthly History Reports

If you are producing daily, weekly or monthly reports, you should now be seeing the "history page." This page features graphs over time of all documents matching the various totals that have been specified in the configuration file. The graphs display accesses over time, unless the order configuration file option has been used to change the scale to reflect bytes transmitted instead of accesses. (NOTE: server logs in the older EMWAC format do not contain information about the number of bytes transmitted.)

If only one day or week of data is present in the log, the charts will not appear, as two points are necessary to draw a line.

Beneath the graphs, links to reports for individual months can be found, or to sublistings for the days of a month or the weeks of a year. Select the report for an individual day, week or month now in order to follow the explanation.

Interpreting Day, Week, Month, and Summary Reports

For each time period, or for the entire log when the the frequency option is set to summary, wusage writes a report providing details of accesses to the server during that time period.

Totals Report

The page begins with a table displaying total accesses and bytes transmitted during that period for each of the totals specified in the configuration file. You can configure many such totals. (NOTE: server logs in the older EMWAC format do not contain information about the number of bytes transmitted.)

Note: if your web browser does not support tables, you will want to change the html option in your configuration file to 2.0 instead of 3.0 to produce lists instead of tables.

Hourly Report

Beneath the totals table is a graph indicating the pattern of access by time of day. This graph displays total accesses on the Y axis and the hour of the day on the X axis. It is possible to change this graph to display bytes transmitted instead using the order configuration file option. Beneath the graph is a table, providing accesses, bytes sent, and bits per second and bytes per second for each hour of the day. The last two columns are especially useful to gauge your impact on your Internet provider's connection to the net through the day, or to gauge the impact of particular documents and sites if the allow and/or allowsites options are in use. (The last two columns are not present if summary reports are being generated.) NOTE: server logs in the older EMWAC format do not contain information about the number of bytes transmitted.

The Frequent Sites Report

If the sites option is present in your configuration file, wusage will report on the sites most frequently accessing your server. Beneath the documents table is a table of the sites (Internet addresses) that accessed your server most often. The table is ranked by total accesses, unless the order option is used to change the ranking order to bytes instead. The number of sites displayed in the table can be set to any value, including all, using the topsites option. Sites can be explicitly allowed or ignored using the allowsites and ignoresites options. This can be handy to exclude local test accesses or allow only accesses from your own organization. Note that major Internet providers such as AOL may appear as a small number of IP addresses making a large number of accesses.

Should I turn on DNS?

Looking at the table of sites, you may note that the sites are given only by IP address, rather than by hostname. Below is an example of each case:

IP Address: 127.0.0.1
Host Name: boutell.com

If you see only IP addresses, it is likely that your server does not perform DNS (Domain Name Service) resolution for each access. This is not uncommon, because DNS can be a slow operation which limits the speed of the web server. If you are interested in seeing full host names, especially to produce meaningful domain charts as described below, you may with to add the dns option in your configuration file.

If you see a mixture of IP addresses and host names, you probably do not need to turn on DNS. It is normal for many addresses (perhaps 30% to 50%) to lack proper host names, and asking wusage to make a second attempt to look them up will only slow down the program.

The Domains Report

If both the sites option and the domains option are present in your configuration file, wusage will report on the Internet domains most frequently accessing your server. Internet top-level domains are political and economic classifications such as com (commercial, often US), edu (educational, often US), and ru (Russia).

Wusage features the ability to combine several domains by continent or another criteria of your choice. This allows wusage to generate a meaningful pie chart which breaks down accesses by continent.

You can control the way domains are combined using the domaingroups option. You can also specify how many domains are included in the chart using the topdomains option, which is often unnecessary due to the set of domain groups for continents included in the configuration files created by makeconf. You can also obtain this list by copying the domaingroups option from the sample.conf file (sample.con under DOS) to your own configuration file.

The Result Codes Report

Next to last in the report is a summary of the number of accesses to your server which resulted in each HTTP result code. The result code 200 ("Ok") is usually the most common. Result codes such as 301 ("Moved Permanently") are not uncommon especially if your site uses imagemaps and other forms of redirection. The result code 404 ("Not Found") sometimes means that users are still trying to access a document that has been removed, and solving such problems is the purpose of the last section of the report.

The Documents Not Found Report

If you have specified the notfound option in your configuration file, then your reports will end with a list of the URLs that users unsuccessfully tried to retrieve from your server. Sometimes this is due to simple keyboarding error, or to outdated links from other sites. At other times, you may realize that you have accidentally removed or renamed a file, which is a good reason to turn on this option.

Other Reports

If you are operating a proxy server, specify the proxysites option in your configuration file to get statistics on the sites being accessed through the proxy server. If you are using HTTP basic authentication or another standard method of password-protecting some of your documents and directories, you will be interested in the authusers option, which produces statistics on the users who logged in to a password-protected portion of your site.

This concludes a brief tour of the reports typically generated by wusage. Many additional configuration options are available, and we invite you to examine the configuration file reference.

Wusage Home Page

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