Generating Statistics

Now that you have a wusage configuration file, you are ready to begin taking advantage of wusage by generating reports.

First, note that if you are producing daily, weekly or monthly reports, you do not have to run Wusage more often than once per day, week or month. It is recommended that you run wusage shortly after midnight, on the first day of the new week or month if you are using weekly or monthly reports. However, with Wusage 6.0 you can run the program as often as you like, and you can "rotate" (remove or archive) your log files immediately afterwards if you wish. Removing old log files will help performance!

If you have just created a new configuration file through the user interface, and you have not used the Edit Configuration File pages to make any changes, then you are currently configured for weekly reporting.

If you want to see information about the current day, week or month in progress, or to save disk space by running the program often and archiving or removing log files afterwards, feel free to run Wusage more often than once per day, week or month. You will find that a report for the time period in progress is included in the index of reports, although this partial report is not included in historical graphs, in order to avoid inaccuracy.

VERY, VERY, VERY IMPORTANT: you may want to keep backups of your log data in case you change your mind about what types of analysis are important to you. What if you decide a year from now that it is very important to see how often a certain document was accessed? Log data is important to your organization -- make a backup copy when you remove it.

Generating Statistics through the User Interface

First, make sure that Wusage is running. See Configuring Wusage for instructions on how to start up the program. If the program is not already running, you will need to use the Browse Configuration Files button to locate the configuration file you wish to work with, and then use the Open button to open that configuration file.

SECURITY NOTE
We do NOT recommend running the Wusage web-based user interface as root under Unix, or as the supervisory account under NT. Although Wusage is not designed to provide access to any unrelated information, it is never a good idea to run applications as root when this can be easily avoided by using another account.

When you have opened an existing configuration file, or you have just finished creating a new configuration file, you will next see a web page that looks like this:

Configuration: /home/www/wusage6.0/goober.conf

Use this button to update your statistics to reflect the latest available log data. You must use this option at least once before you can view any statistics.
[Update Statistics Now]
Use this button to view your latest statistics. Depending on your configuration, you can also do this via a regular web server.
[View Statistics Now]
Use this button to edit any aspect of your configuration, including as filtering, log file locations, report settings, and so on.
[Edit Configuration]
Fill out these fields if you wish to re-generate reports that have been generated before. Then click Update Statistics For Time Period, below.
From: __ Month __ Day __ Year
To: __ Month __ Day __ Year [Update Statistics For Time Period]

This is the main control page for this configuration file.

At least 99% of the time, you will simply want to click on the Update Statistics Now button. When you do this, Wusage will begin to analyze your log data. The length of time this takes can vary depending on the options you have selected and the amount of log data you have, as well as the speed of the computer that is running Wusage. The program will display the number of log file lines that have been analyzed so far as it proceeds.

In rare situations, such as when you have changed your configuration and you want to re-generate reports that have already been written, you will want to fill in the starting and ending dates that need to be re-analyzed and click on the Update Statistics For Time Period button. This feature is mainly used after making a configuration file change. It is also useful if the program was mistakenly used to analyze the wrong log data. If you edit your configuration file and run wusage again, the program will NOT re-generate reports it has already written unless you use Update Statistics For Time Period.

Moving On

You are now ready to move on to interpreting the reports of Wusage. The remainder of this chapter covers an alternate command-line approach to running the program.

Generating Statistics From The Command Line

To generate statistics from the command line instead of through the user interface, cd to the directory containing the program and enter the following command:

wusage -c wusage.conf    (or wusage.con under DOS)

(Important Unix note: Unix users may need to type ./wusage, not just wusage, to be sure that the program is found.) Note: here it is assumed that your configuration file has been created and has the name wusage.conf (or wusage.con under DOS).

If this is the first time you have run the program, a welcoming message will be displayed. Under normal circumstances, no output will be printed on the screen by wusage. If your log file is large, it may take some time for wusage to complete its run, especially if the DNS option has been selected. If your log already contains hostnames for most sites, or if speed is an issue, do not select the DNS option in your configuration file, or set the DNS option to fast, which looks up names that appear in your reports only but does not work with the ignoresites and domains options.

Note: if your log file is empty, wusage may indicate that no input was available. This is normal and the message will go away when your log file actually contains accesses. If you do have accesses in log file and you still get this message, your log file may not be in a format that Wusage supports.

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