WebTrends, Urchin, ClickTracks, etc. They “make sense” of Web transaction data so we can figure out what is going on at the Web server. Often, though, this type of software gets in to the non-technical folks’ hands and can become a problem. Have you ever had this conversation or heard a version of it?:
Marketing Mark: Hey, Dan, we did not get any visitors last night on the Web site -- and everybody kept requesting this page, errors/404.html. Is there something wrong with the site or something?
Admin Adam: I hate Mondays. Why did I ever give you nimrods a Web analysis program?
We feel for you, Adams of the World.
What’s worse is that there is no analytics program designed for Adam, for an admin -- software that server admins love, that gets down in the sticks of real server/app data that we can derive meaning (and hopefully a solution) from.
What about a log and system analysis program for the more technically-minded out there? Hell, if our server goes down, we at Port80 go to the actual log files themselves, not a proxy. We check out the event log, not some watered down report. What if there was a analysis tool out there that brought all this together and made sense? What if it could connect the dots like a good admin could (or at least go farther down that road)?
Oh wait, somebody is already on the job with the new Splunk Server, and splunking is on the rise -- there is hope out there.
Splunk will consume and make sense of Web server stuff: (logs, configuration files, -messages, and database transactions) and also cross-server systems analysis (any type of machine data including Web servers, application servers, email servers, databases, and network devices). They have developed an algorithm that reconstructs what happened on a network that “dynamically discovers event relationships across diverse domains of machine data and build a searchable web of events to trace the real behavior of running systems.” Sweet.
Have you tried it? What do you think? The software runs on Linux, but can be accessed currently for client reports on Firefox and Netscape on Windows (and they plan IE support soon).
No Windows version planned for the server, so if you like it, maybe we will develop it.
: )
Best,
Port80 Software