Web Server Statistics

Apache Server Logs:

The UT Austin Web Central Apache Server creates daily logs for all four of the servers that support www.utexas.edu. The daily logs are kept for seven days. There are three types of logs created: the access log, the referer log and the agent log. These logs contain the following data:

Access Log

1. IP address of requesting computer (not the host name)
2. date and time of request
3. type of request
4. what file was requested
5. protocol of request
6. server response code
7. # of bytes sent to requesting computer

Referer Log

The referer log basically shows which page a person came from. A sample log entry looks like this:

http://www.utexas.edu -> /search/index.html

This log entry indicates someone hit the /search/index.html page from the http://www.utexas.edu URL, essentially they clicked the Search link on the UT Home Page.

You can make a special request to the Web Office to produce ad-hoc reports from the referer log. You can see some of these sample reports at TeamWeb Reports .

Agent Log

The agent log records the HTTP_USER_AGENT (the browser) of each request

Server Statistics Reports

Every Sunday the daily access logs are used to create server statistic reports (using  Urchin ) for UT Web Central as well as 200+ departmental web sites. The reports for the previous weeks are available for at least  2 years .

You can see a demo of Urchin as well as request weekly departmental web statistics .

• Prior to December 2001, www.stat was the software used to create the server statistic reports.
• In Fall of 2001 we exceeded the limits of www.stat. Analog software replaced www.stat .
• In Spring 2004, Urchin replaced Analog.