Cpanel

What Is Webalizer And How Do I Access and Use Webalizer Traffic Stats?

--The Webalizer is a web server log file analysis program that produces usage statistics of your site transfer and usage in HTML format for viewing with a browser. The results obtained are shown in both a columnar and a graphical format, making it (relatively) easy to interpret. It gives you yearly, monthly, daily and hourly usage statistics, as well as displaying usage by site, URL, referrer, browsers used and country.

Where do I find The Webalizer?
The Webalizer can be accessed from Cpanel under Web/FTP stats. The files for The Webalizer are stored in your section of the server under docs/webstat.

What actually does it show you?
The Webalizer produces several reports and graphics for your site, for each month processed and lays these out in separate files. A summary page is also produced for the current and previous months (up to 12 in total). The files produced are as follows:

index.html - your main summary page for the last 12 months

usage.gif - a yearly graph displayed on the main index page, showing the various results for each of the last 12 months usage_YYYYMM.html - the monthly summary page, each month changing the YYYYMM part to reflect that month

usage_YYYYMM.gif - a monthly usage graph for the specified month (appears on the usage_YYYMM.html page)

daily_usage_YYYYMM.gif - a daily usage graph for specified month (appears on the usage_YYYMM.html page)

hourly_usage_YYYYMM.gif - an hourly usage graph for specified month (appears on the usage_YYYMM.html page)

webalizer.hist - Previous month history

webalizer.current - Incremental Data

The yearly (index.html) report shows the statistics for the last 12 month period, and links to each month's separate page (usage_YYYYMM.html). This monthly report has detailed statistics for that month with additional links to any URL's and referrers found.

Common meanings of some results

Hits
Any request made to the server and which is consequently stored in your log files, is called a 'hit'. Hits are very similar to files, except that they do not require the server to return anything to the client (the person accessing your site). The request could be for anything located on your website from html pages, graphic images and audio files, to cgi scripts and on. Each valid line in your server log will be counted as a hit. This number shown in The Webalizer represents the total number of requests that were made to the server about your website, during the specified report period.

Files
Some of the requests made to the server about your website require that the server then send something back to the requesting client (whoever is accessing you site at the time), such as a html page. When this occurs, it is called a 'file' and the files total is incremented. Files are similar to hits and the connection between hits and files can be thought of as "incoming requests" (hits) and "outgoing responses" (files). Files, therefore, represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually result in a page being sent back to the user's browser. Not all hits will send any data, such as Error 404 (Not Found) requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

Pages
In general, any HTML document, or anything (like a cgi or php script) that generates an HTML document, will be called a page. This does not include any other items that are inside a document, like graphics, audio clips, etc. Any page that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi will usually be classed as a page. Other extensions, such as .php3, .php and .pl will normally be called a page, too.

Sites
Each request made to the server will come from a unique site, and can be referred to by a name or an IP address. The sites number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server. Please note that this DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users that visited, however, it be about as close as you can get.

Visits
Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address, the amount of time since a previous request by the address is calculated (if any time has passed at all). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (this will have been set in the configuration of The Webalizer), or this particular IP has never made a request before, it is considered a new visit, and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). Please note that visits only occur on page requests, where information is consequently sent back to the user's browser.

KBytes
The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data that was sent out by the server. This value is created directly from the log file, so it is up to the web server to produce accurate numbers in the logs (perhaps this can explain the difference between the KB shown in Webalizer and the KB shown via PLESK). Please note that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000.

Top Entry and Exit Pages
The Top Entry and Exit Pages can give a rough estimate of which page visitors entered your site. It also shows you at which page that certain URL they left the site through.

Referrers
Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site, or caused the browser to request something from your server. You will probably notice that the greatest majority of requests appear to be from your own URLs (pages within your site), since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. For example, if one of your pages contains links to 10 graphics, then each request for the page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of that page.

User Agents
User Agents are a fancier way of saying browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, etc). Each will report itself in a unique way to your server.

Countries
Countries are determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is hard to do nowadays, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past, for example .com no longer means just US, but anywhere in the world (since we can now buy more or less any domain extension, regardless of where we reside). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large percentage of dial-up and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an IP address.

Search string analysis and how it works
The Webalizer does a very simple breakdown of referrer strings that it finds, looking for well known search string patterns. Most of the major search engines are supported (Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, etc). Unfortunately, detect all search strings is nearly impossible, due to changing structures in how they work, new search engines using different methods, etc. However, it should be enough to give a fairly good indication of what users were searching for when they stumbled across your site, which may help when developing the met-tags for your site.

Why don't the daily visit totals add up to the monthly total?
You cannot add up the daily visit totals and compare them to the monthly total, they are different reporting periods. For example, if someone visits your site at 11:45pm and stays until 12:15am, the monthly total would show one visit, while the daily totals will show two (one for each day).

What is the difference between 'HITS' and 'FILES'?
There is an on-line quick help that explains most of the major terms and headings used in the reports. Basically, HITS is the total number of HTTP requests that the server received during the reporting period. Any request made to the server is considered a hit. FILES is the number of hits that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user, such as an HTML page or image. 'Total Files' and '200 - OK' totals should be the same. If you add up the totals in the 'Hits by Response Code' section, it should be the same as the 'Total Hits' figure. For a complete description of what all the numbers mean in the output, see the README file, which is supplied in all distributions and available from our ftp site. There is also an Webalizer Quick Help document on-line that explains the most common terms used in the reports.

Changing the configuration file has no effect?
Which configuration file are you changing? The Webalizer looks in the current directory for a file named webalizer.conf, which it will process before any other configuration files. If one is not present in the current directory, it will look for the file /etc/webalizer.conf, and process it before any other configuration files. Some configuration options allow you to toggle settings on or off, while some cannot be reversed. If you, for example specify the configuration option "HideURL *.gif" in the system wide default file /etc/webalizer.conf, you cannot 'un-hide' that object using a local configuration file. In general, single sites should have a single configuration file, such as /etc/webalizer.conf. Larger sites that have multiple host/virtual hosts probably should use different configuration files for each host and not have a default webalizer.conf file.

My configuration file is being read twice!
Do Not use '-c webalizer.conf' on the command line! This file is always read if found, regardless of any other configuration files that may be specified. If you do specify it on the command line, it will be read twice...

I get Warning: Truncating oversized xxx or String exceeds storage size warnings! Why?
Internally, The Webalizer has a fixed maximum size for various parts of the log record. If a particular field is longer than will fit, you will see these warnings. The most common is that for the request field on sites that have a lot of CGI interaction. They can be safely ignored. If you don't want to see warnings or errors, you can use the ReallyQuiet option (-Q command line switch) to suppress them.
Why don't the daily visit totals add up to the monthly total?

You cannot add up the daily visit totals and compare them to the monthly total, they are different reporting periods. For example, if someone visits your site at 11:45pm and stays until 12:15am, the monthly total would show one visit, while the daily totals will show two (one for each day).

Why do my reports show more Sites than Visits?
Visits are only triggered when a valid request is found for a page, as defined by your PageType setting (or a URL that ends with a slash, which is also considered a page type). Sites however, are counted regardless of the request type. It is very common to have more sites than visits, particularly if you host non-pagetype URLs on your site that are linked to from the outside. If you are not hosting URLs that are linked to from outside sites, then make sure your PageType setting is correct. The default is .htm, .html and .cgi extensions, unless you specify otherwise.

My stats are not updating, why!?!
In order to produce or update statistic reports, the Webalizer must be run. In most cases, if your stat report is not being updated, then the program isn't being run. If it is, then it may be encountering a problem during processing that needs to be taken care of. The easiest way to determine this is to manually run the program from the command line and observe the informational messages it produces. Make sure your config file does not prevent messages from being displayed (Quiet and ReallyQuiet options). Without these messages, there is no way to determine what, if any, problems the program may be having, and any attempt to correct the problem would simply be a random guess.