Interpreting the Reports of Wusage

Viewing Reports through the User Interface

If you have just finished generating statistics through the user interface, scroll to the very bottom of the web page in which you watched the program's progress. If all went well, you will see two buttons at the bottom, after the words Analysis complete. Click on the View Statistics button to view the resulting reports in your web browser.

On the other hand, if you are currently looking at the main menu, enter the name of the configuration file and click the Open button. Then, from the main control page, click on the View Statistics button to view the resulting reports.

Other Ways to View Reports

You can also view your reports by opening the the index.html (or index.htm) file in the report directory with your favorite web browser. If the report directory is in a location where it can be seen by a web server, you can access it by that means. Alternatively you can access it by opening the index page as a local file, if the machine running Wusage and the machine running the browser are one and the same. Note that the index page filename can be changed using the indexname configuration file option. Note: 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 and totalsgroups 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, and in some variations on other formats, 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.)

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: some server logs do not contain information about the number of bytes transmitted.

Directories Report

The next section of the report contains a pie chart and a table revealing the most heavily used top-level directories and documents on your site. The listing for each directory provides a link to "drill down" to an additional report which reveals the popularity of each document or sub-directory inside that directory. This information is on a separate page, for clarity. Links are also provided to the appropriate section of the referrersbydocument report, if it has been turned on.

The pie chart lists only directories and documents which were "popular" enough to occupy a visible pie slice, and combines the rest in the Other category. The table is ranked by total accesses, unless the order option is used to change the ranking order to bytes instead. It is also possible to use the alpha option to specify alphabetical sorting. The number of directory levels deep to which you can "drill down" is determined by the directorydepth option, and in order to keep reports manageable in size, the value of this option defaults to 2. A directory depth of 2 means that only the top directory and each of its immediate sub-directories receives a directory report.

Documents can be explicitly allowed or ignored using the allow and ignore options, which are useful to exclude potentially uninteresting documents such as inline images, or to allow only the documents of one user. These filtering options can be reached by using the Edit Configuration File button on the main control page and clicking on the Filtering Options link on the main editing page.

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. It is also possible to use the alpha option to specify alphabetical sorting. 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. These filtering options can be reached by using the Edit Configuration File button on the main control page and clicking on the Filtering Options link on the main editing page. 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 wish to turn on 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 the user interface.

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.

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.

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.

If your web server logs contain referring URL information, you will want to turn on the referrers, referringsites, and search keywords reports, which provide information about the external pages and sites that link to your site, and even about the web searches that lead users to discover your site! If you want very detailed information about the pages that link to your site, consider the referrersbydocument option, a large but useful report revealing the pages on the Internet that link to each of your pages. If your web server logs contain Apache-format user identification "cookies", you can turn on the users and apachecookies options to learn more about the activities of typical users.

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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