I just wanted to let our faithful forum-goers know that I have upgraded our stats servers to Urchin version 5.0 effective 09/02/03.

There are a few very minor upgrade details I am looking into and working with Urchin on which I expect to have under wraps today, and from tonight on forward we should be doing a more detailed and intensive processing of stats information.


Currently the issues at hand have to do with the DNS resolution and scheduling for DNS lookup client updates, all stats information, usernames and password have migrated successfully (as best as I can see), and we should be in good shape. Once I have the upgrade 100% finalized (basically after I once through my few points of concern with Urchin), we will see if more detailed reporting can be enabled and move forward from there.

As for the little bumps with the upgrade, I do apologize...I personally wanted to wait until 5.1, but it seemed demand was high and for the most part v5.0 seems to be ok for the most part.....so we will see.

It looks good so far.

Only thing i noticed is the "spiders" section doesn't work, which was something i was excited to see on the new version. But im sure you have a lot to work out still.

Hiya AdminGuy,

I'm not seeing stats for Tuesday yet on the new Urchin. Are they delayed?

Thanks! www.brassunicorn.com

Hi there,

I like 5.0 so far, but I liked Urchin to begin with so thanks for updating. I notice that Tuesdays Stats are missing and Wednseday is twice as high as normal. Did Tuesday get rolled into Wednseday. No biggy if it did. I am just curious if we just had an exceptionally busy traffic day on Wednseday.

The first night Urchin ran we had an unexpected upgrade "bump", that being the way the Urhcin scheduler service and web service reapplied themselves. To make a long story short, the method I was using to access all the logs on other server was/is very closely tied to how these services run....so whne Urchin 5.0 ran, it could not grab any of the logs.


I have corrected this problem and test it out....things seem pretty smooth now.

What we tried to do to recover from the day logs weren't collected was to manually run the daily scan after I corrected the issues with how Urchin services run, we did not get all of them, and we tried to aggregate some of them for the next night.

Unfortunately it seems like we may have lost Tuesday, 9/02 for many people, but some people may see the data lumped into Wednesday 9/03. I know it is kind of a mess and I apologize, it was one of the issues with upgrading.

The good news is that now people should start seeing DNS processing information in their stats!!!! This is something I know a lot of customers have been asking for, and it *appears* that now Urchin 5 really and truly does run so much better that we can keep this in place.

I will need to hear feedback from you, our faithful forum members to let me know how you feel about Urchin 5, the reports themselves, the new info, how wel lit processes in a timely manner, etc, etc....I plan on watching things for a week or so just to make sure everything looks ok, but responses from our customers are the best measure of how things are really doing!

I like the New Urchin. Thanks AdminFellow,

Is there anyway to filter out our web design ips? We have two or three machines hitting the site fairly consistantly with upgrades and such - sometimes 30 or 40 or more page views a day. Can these be pre screened not to be included in the stats?

It's nice now to be able to see the ip of our visitors. Is there a way to drill down to what pages each individual is visiting? Or, back the other way. It would be nice to drill 'up' to see why and where some of the more obscure pages are being called.

I suspect we are being farmed for images and descriptions by someone. Is it possible to block an individual ip from accessing a site?

Like danilyn22, I would be interested in comments and perspectives on what a lot of these stats reflect.

Still interested in the 404 hits. What is generating that?

Thanks!

I am also showing a lot of 404.asp hits. Was told by Tech Support that I might have some images or pages being called by our IP address instead of Domain. That has to be cleaned up before we upgrade to 4.0. Is there anyway to easily find out where that may be occuring?

This breaks a little from the thread but is it better to have the full url in a link or just the page ie:

href=http://www.brassunicorn.com/page.asp?id=25

OR /page.asp?id=25

OR even page.asp?=25 (without forward slash) ?

How or can this effect load speed, spidering or weblogs?

Thanks

It's tough to find out exactly what is links/images are broken with way 404.asp works. Since if a page is not found, it directs to that file, there is no real info on that being hit before the redirection. So, in a nutshell, you really can't figure out directly what is linked to the IP, what doesn't exist, and what is actually working from Urchin itself.

Really, the cause of the 404's aren't isolated to one thing in particular. Some things below could cause it:

1) Bad links that people hit internally on your site
2) Old advertisement that goes to an old page
3) Old pages that are bookmarked by your customers that are not there anymore
4) Spiders crawling looking for something that may have been there before and is not now

There are more that I'm sure I cannot think of right now, but all in all the 404's are typical (though I know frustrating) and all of our sites get them. Sites were getting these errors months ago, but instead of the 404.asp page being a page that they hit, it went to the standard Microsoft Page not Found error page, which was logged differently by Urchin. Now, your customers will at least be in the cart if they go somewhere bad rather then seeing the blank white Page not Found error page.

Good point Andy. Additionally I am not sure if Urchin can show a history of what page led you to the 404, although I will add that to my research list and post more info should I get it.

I would like to suggest a couple of options for tracking down some possible 404 pages, there is a nice web spidering program known as Xenu, which is free and can be downloaded here - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

A thorough run of Xenu should show you where any actual broken links for you site based on spidering/flow of action occur....although for custom pages that are not linked anywhere or pages that have been removed I am not sure how much (if any) help Xenu will be.

Another point is that web design, SEO, and related services can help do it for you and possibly do a more thorough checkup on your site for any problematic spots, etc, etc.