The Account Administration Page

Account Administration Page

Use this button to indicate that a single, shared log file or single directory of files contains web server log data for ALL accounts, or to indicate that each account should analyze a separate, independent log file or set of files.

[ Log File Location Settings ]

When you click the Log File Location Settings button, you will first be prompted to choose either shared log files or separate log files for each server. Select either Yes or No, then click the Next Step button.

If you chose No, the next page will invite you to clicked the Finished button to return to the account administration settings page. If you chose Yes, you will next be prompted to indicate whether your log file entries are in ascending chronological order within each individual log file. This is very important: certain web servers, most notably Netscape Enterprise Server, routinely produce log files in which entries are not in chronological order. In these cases, Wusage will need to sort the log files for you. Select this option if necessary, and then click on the Next Step button. Note: Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers usually do not require that this option be selected.

If you selected shared log files in step one, you will now be invited to locate your shared log files. Click Browse Log Files to begin. For complete instructions, please read the section of the manual before proceeding.

Use this button to indicate whether log files should be automatically "rotated" (archived, compressed and removed) after analysis is performed.

[ Log Rotation Settings ]

Most web server administrators, especially ISPs, eventually want to see their log files compressed, renamed, and ultimately deleted after a certain amount of time. Wusage provides a powerful log rotation mechanism which accomplishes this goal.

To begin changing your log rotation settings, click on the Log Rotation Settings button. The next page will invite you to decide whether log rotation should or should not be performed. Make your selection and click the Next Step button.

If you chose not to rotate your logs, you will be returned immediately to the Account Administration Page. If you did choose to rotate your logs, you will now be asked to indicate how many days' worth of log data should be kept in compressed form. Log data older than this number of days will be automatically deleted. Alternatively, you can choose to keep log data in compressed form forever. If you choose to keep log data forever, it will of course continue to accumulate and take up disk space. If you choose to remove it after a certain number of days, it will not be possible to re-generate reports with a different configuration for a period of time that has already been removed from the log files. Make your choice with care, and then click on the Next Step button to return to the Account Administration Page.

"Where are the archived logs being stored?"

Note: you do not need to read this indented section. It is provided purely for the convenience of those interested.

Under Unix, if you are running Wusage as the Unix user "www", and you have created a Wusage account named "client", you will find the archived log files in this location:

/home/www/wusage-accounts/client/log-archive

Under Windows, the same situation would produce a directory as follows:

C:\Program Files\Wusage8\Administrator\wusage-accounts\client\log-archive

In any case, the archive directory will contain gzip-compressed log files, named as follows (for example):

1997-07-10-1-log.gz

That is, the four-digit year, followed by a dash, followed by the two-digit month, followed by a dash, followed by the two-digit day, followed by another dash, followed by an ordinal number, followed by -log.gz.

The file index.dat is used internally by Wusage to determine what range of dates and times of day is contained in each file. This information can also be readily determined from the contents of the files themselves and is repeated in index.dat for performance reasons only.

These log files are always in extended common log format, and they are always on a per-account basis, no matter what format the original log files may have had.

Since the program automatically locates and reuses these archived logs whenever it is useful to do so, most administrators will never need to know this information.

Use this button to set the time at which reports for ALL unprivileged accounts should be updated. Not currently scheduled for automatic updates.

[ Schedule Updates ]

Of course, no one wants to manually update the reports for a hundred ISP clients! Wusage takes care of this task for you.

Click on Schedule Updates to begin the process. The next page will ask you to select daily, weekly, or monthly updates. ISPs will almost always prefer daily updates, even if reports are not produced for single days, because customers appreciate the ability to see how the week's statistics are progressing before it is over.

On the next page, select an hour of the day when your updates should take place. If you are not relying on Wusage to update your logs, take care to choose a time which allows Wusage to see all of the available log data before any external log rotation mechanism interferes. Since this is difficult to do, we recommend either using the built-in log rotation features, described above, or scheduling your reports manually using another mechanism such as Unix cron or Windows NT's AT command. See Running Wusage Automatically for more information about these alternative approaches.

Click on the OK button to return to the account administration page.

Use this button to restrict the set of buttons available to individual web server administrators and to set overall upper limits on report size and complexity, which will be automatically enforced for all accounts.

[ Overall Limits ]

Most ISPs are concerned about the potential memory, disk, and CPU impact of each program installed on the system. Many ISPs also wish to restrict the set of options available to their clients within Wusage to a greater degree than that Wusage provides by default. Wusage provides a simple way to limit the size and number of the reports produced by the program, and to deny access to certain buttons.

Click the Overall Limits button. First, take note of the checkboxes which allow the administrator to refuse access to the Regenerate Completely, Update for Time Period, and Edit Configuration buttons. If you are using shared log files and/or log file rotation, you will probably want to deny access to Regenerate Completely and Update for Time period. Users often fail to realize that these buttons can cause loss of reports if there is not enough old log information kept in the log archive (that is, if it goes back only 30 days, by your decision).

The Edit Configuration button, however, is extremely useful to clients, and many ISPs choose to keep it available. The options below will help you to restrict the possible effects of this button to a safe range of possibilities.

Below these checkboxes, read on to see a simple table of rules which determine how complex reports can be. First of all, you may want to disable quarterly, annual and summary reports by clearing those checkboxes. This will significantly reduce the amount of virtual memory required by Wusage. You may also wish to disable daily reports to reduce disk usage.

Second, review the limitations set on the number of reports that can be stored on disk, and the number of time periods of historical data that can be kept for "quick queries." To avoid "quota-busting" amounts of disk usage, set the keepdailyreports option conservatively. Be aware that this will cause reports to eventually be deleted. You can feel free to set the number of quick-query databases kept as low as you wish, as this feature is not considered critical by most users.

The "documents by directory" report, while quite valuable, can be very large on sites with a substantial number of documents. Limit the depth of this report to limit users to grand totals for subdirectories below a certain point.

The "referrers by document" report is also valuable, but quite sizeable; it lists each of the external web pages that brought users to each page on the site analyzed. Turning off this report here will still allow users to generate an overall ranking of referring pages, referring sites and search keywords.

The size of the other reports produced by Wusage is kept in check by the last option. To ensure that reports display no more than the top 20 items, regardless of what users may attempt to set in the configuration editor, just set a limit of 20 here.

When you are pleased with your restrictions, click the OK button to return to the account administration page.

Use this button to add a new unprivileged account, for use by an individual web server administrator, providing access to a single configuration file only.

[ Add Account ]

Now that you have made the most important general settings that apply to all accounts, you are ready to begin creating accounts for individual web server administrators. This process is straightforward. To create the first account, click on the Add Account button.

The first page will prompt you to select a username and password for the new account. Since Wusage accounts are separate from Unix and/or Windows NT accounts, any accidental sharing of this password will not grant access to any resources outside of Wusage itself. However, we still recommend that you assign a reasonably hard-to-guess password.

Be sure to make a note of the username and password so that you can provide it to the web server administrator in question! They will need this information to log into the program when accessing their reports or editing their configuration settings. For more information regarding how to install the program for remote access by individual clients, see Remote Access For One or Many Users .

Step One: Locating Log Files

If you selected shared log files for all accounts, you will not be asked to locate log files for each account. You can skip ahead to the next step, which will appear for you as "Step One."

The next page you see will contain the following prompt:

Create New Configuration

Step One: indicate the location of your web server's log file, or a directory that contains one or more web server log files. Wusage must have a source of log data in order to produce a meaningful analysis.

Step Two: Specifying your Virtual Server Name (Domain Name)

Create New Configuration

Step Two: enter the host name of your web server. EXAMPLE: www.mydomain.com

_____________________ [Next Step!]

Now click on the Next Step! button to proceed to the next configuration step.

Step Three: Deciding How Many Reports to Produce

Wusage can produce daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual and summary reports. Of course, this requires memory and disk space. Web sites which produce more than 5 megabytes of log data per day should turn off the summary and annual reports. Web sites which produce close to 1 gigabyte of log data per day may need to turn off everything except for daily reports. Fortunately, historical information is still available; there are day-to-day charts which can be easily accessed from the "executive summary" for any particular day.

You will see a configuration page like this:

Select Reporting Frequencies

Step Three: Wusage can create daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and cumulative summary reports. However, turning on the longer-term reporting frequencies requires more memory. If your log files are large, you may wish to turn off quarterly, annual and cumulative summary reports. [X] Daily Reports
[X] Weekly Reports
[X] Monthly Reports
[X] Quarterly Reports
[X] Annual Reports
[X] Summary Reports
[Next Step!]

By default, all of the reporting frequencies are turned on. Decide which reports to turn off, if any, turn them off by clicking on the checkboxes, and click the Next Step! button.

Completing the Process

Configuration Created

A configuration file which is compatible with typical web servers and preferences has been created. There are many, many additional features and settings which you can activate by using the configuration file editor.

[Continue]

Use this button to add a new unprivileged account, copying as much information as possible from the existing settings of another account. You will then be prompted to select an existing account to copy from, and also for settings that must be unique for each account.

[ Copy Account ]

Creating accounts can be tedious, especially if you wish to make certain settings in the configuration editor for each account. Fortunately, it is possible to "copy" an account, creating a new account with the same settings.

When you click on the Copy Account button, you will be asked for a username, password, and virtual web server name for the new account. You will also be asked for a log file location if you are not using shared log files. That's it! Everything else is copied from the original account. This makes it straightforward to create a "standard" configuration and then copy that configuration for each new virtual web site customer.

Use this button to remove an existing unprivileged account.

[ Remove Account ]

Of course, from time to time you will need to delete an account. Use the Remove Account button to do so. You will be given an opportunity to select the account you wish to remove from a list of all accounts.

Use this button to access or modify an existing unprivileged account. This includes updating statistics, regenerating reports, editing the configuration settings, and changing the password and/or and user name associated with the account.

[ Edit Account ]

For various reasons you will often wish to directly edit the configuration settings associated with an account. It is also often necessary to assign a new password or change the name of an account. You can accomplish all of these things via the Edit Account button.

On the page that follows, click on the Open This Account button if you wish to work with the account, which includes editing configuration settings and updating statistics manually. Or, if you simply wish to change the username or password, update those fields and click the OK button to return to the Account Administration Page.

Use this button to edit the username and password of the administrative account, which is permitted to add and remove other accounts, edit all configuration files, and create new configuration files.

[ Edit ADMINISTRATIVE Account ]

The "administrative account" is the account you are using right now as you work with the Account Administration Page. Like all other accounts, this account can be accessed remotely; if you are using the Unix version of the product, you are already doing so. See Remote Access for One Or Many Users for more information about making the program available for remote access. From time to time, you may wish to change the administrative username and password; you can do this by clicking on the Edit ADMINISTRATIVE Account button and filling out the fields on the page that follows.

Use this button to shut off the program when you are through working with Wusage.

[OFF (Exit Program)]

This final button is used to turn off the program. When you are through working with Wusage, you can use this button to exit the program entirely. Windows and Macintosh users will prefer to leave the program running at all times so that scheduled updats can take place. Just minimize or collapse the Wusage application window instead.

Please note: if you are accessing the program remotely, it will automatically shut off after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Moving On

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USA
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