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Compiling usage stats

Sun, 2008-05-11 18:30 — wjdennen
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I'm always impressed when I see other schools usage statistics and graphs. Unfortunately, Luminis does not seem to have any built-in tools for gathering an analyzing usage stats. So, I wanted to create this as a place to compile hints and tips.

To get a rundown of unique logins each day, you can run this against your /opt/luminis/logs/session.log file(s):

grep "user login:" session.log | awk '{ print $1 " " $5 }' | sort | uniq | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq -c

Output will look like this:

94 2008-05-08
90 2008-05-09
26 2008-05-10
10 2008-05-11

(First column is the count of unique user logins for that date. Each user is counted once, no matter how many times they log in.)

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Tue, 2008-05-13 13:33 — Jason

grep session.log

That's is a handy trick thanks.

Along those lines, if you are using Luminis IV, you can enable the tomcat access log by editing $CP_ROOT/products/tomcat/tomcat-cp/conf/server.xml and adding (or uncomment) the log section like this:
Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
directory="/mnt/portal/logs" prefix="vmpw2_access_log." suffix=".txt"
pattern="common" resolveHosts="false"

Then use any web log parser to compile stats on the access log.

When I was using Luminis III, I used http://awstats.sourceforge.net to compile stats on the sun web server logs. http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/ and http://www.analog.cx/ worked pretty well also.

Tue, 2008-05-20 17:27 — bsimpson

awstats

Your comment got me curious so I went and downloaded the awstats software. After installing and configuring it with the changes you mentioned, I let it run for a while and build some statistics.

Unfortunately, I believe that Google Analytics encompasses the entire scope of this server analyzer software for MUCH less work. I would recommend anyone looking for statistics look to check out Google Analytics first. (If privacy isn't an issue)

Just a suggestion for those that are equally curious about server statistics.

Wed, 2008-05-21 02:50 — Jason

I agree

I agree. Back when I was using AWstats, google analytics hadn't been released yet.

There is one advantage with using a local log parser program though: the ability to combine the resulting data with other data on campus. As far as I know (and I'm just now getting google analytics setup) you can't get your data back in bulk format. I saw the areas where you could download a report, but nothing like a big csv file of the whole set.

For instance, given that I know who the person was because they logged in, if the data is local, I can tag the html request in the log with the persons username. Then using banner data, I can cross-reference that with pop select info, or whatever.

For example, if we setup a special tab to correspond to your student major, I could cross reference the web hits with log in name and major from banner and see which majors were using their new tab.

I am going to use google in addition to a local one for sure though.

Wed, 2008-05-14 18:00 — jwheat

session log tweak

This is great.

So does anyone know how to rotate the session.log on a daily basis?

I see in the $CP_WEBINF/config/cplog4j.properites where I can set the MaxFileSize and MaxBackupIndex,
but instead of it rotating based on size, I'd like it to rotate based on the day.

can it do that?

I guess I could set it to a large number - and move it out at 12am every night

Thu, 2008-05-15 05:49 — David

weekly rotate

Hi Jon

Here is how we rotate the session.log weekly, it also renames the session.log to session.log.yyyy-ww, check RN-1306 on the support site for further details/options:

log4j.logger.com.pipeline.sm.SessionManager=INFO, session
log4j.additivity.com.pipeline.sm.SessionManager=false

#log4j.appender.session=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.session=org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.session.File=${util.logservice.log4j.directory}/sessionlogs/session.log
#log4j.appender.session.MaxFileSize=1MB
#log4j.appender.session.MaxBackupIndex=2
log4j.appender.session.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.session.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ISO8601}: %m%n
log4j.appender.session.DatePattern='.'yyyy-ww

Dave

Thu, 2008-05-15 08:49 — jwheat

Session roller

Thanks,
I just changed my file - this is great.
Just need to write a script to run that grep and toss it all into a database table somewhere for our portal team to report on.