I struggled for a long long time to reconcile analog and webtrends, and eventually succeeded (within 5%). are you sure webtrends is counting 302 redirects? I'm pretty sure ours doesn't. maybe you have to specify the status codes in the webtrends filters. I'm not sure what kind of filtering you do, but ours is rather detailed, so it took some effort to make sure that the filters of both apps had the same criteria even though the filtering logic is very different. for starters, analog filters are sequential and more configurable, while webtrends works do-all-includes-first-then-all-excludes, certainly less flexible. and watch out for the internal settings of each webtrends filter; I orignally didn't take into account how the ANDs and the ORs of those settings. > -----Original Message----- > From: Dave Atkins [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 6:27 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [analog-help] analog vs. webtrends - anybody done any > exhaustive comparison on data accuracy? > > > I think we all have a webtrends story to tell...but basically > my problem now > is that we started using analog and when we run webtrends on > the same data, > we get different results--sometimes big differences like > 700,000 vs. 900,000 > page views for a site. I was wondering if anyone had done a > comparison and > identified the differences in how the two products work, to > help justify a > decision to abandon webtrends. > > For example, in the case above, I tracked down the problem to > discoving that > analog discards all 302 redirects while webtrends appears to > count them if > the referer fails. This could happen, for example, if you > have a lot of > .shtml pages supporting a legacy system where the .shtml > redirects stale > links to new dynamic pages AND you are using a caching product like > SpiderCache to cache your dynamic pages. What happens in the > log files is > that you see an entry for a page like: > product_12345.shtml with a 302 code and then, in some cases, > you see a hit > to showproduct.asp?productID=12345 with a code 200. This is the normal > behavior. But if the showproduct.asp page is cached > externally or running on > another server, there will never be the followup request in > your server log. > At least this is what I could figure out so far. > > My conclusion is that analog is discarding all 302s > (reasonable behavior) > but webtrends must "care" if the referer actually succeeds. > If there is no > subsequent 200 from the same IP address, the original 302 is > counted. That > seems a little too "smart" for the likes of webtrends, but it > is the only > way I can explain my discrepancies. When I look at the file > types report > from both WT and analog, I see many more .shtml types recorded by > webtrends...not quite a 1:1 of course, but that is how I > started looking > into the .shtml files as the possible culprit. > > Anyway, I just wondered if anyone had a document summarizing > the differences > which would help me as I have to explain why if we use > analog, it means > fewer page views which means that 18 people (the site > managers) are going to > be coming after me! > > Dave Atkins > > -------------------------------------------------------------- > ---------- > This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this > mailing list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with "unsubscribe" in the main BODY OF THE MESSAGE. > List archived at > http://www.mail-archive.com/analog-help@lists.isite.net/ > -------------------------------------------------------------- > ---------- > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the main BODY OF THE MESSAGE. List archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/analog-help@lists.isite.net/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
