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Analog 5.03: Configuring the output

So far we have mainly discussed commands which control how analog reads the logfiles. We now get on to commands for configuring the output.

First, you can change the style of the output using the OUTPUT command. There are five possible output styles, called HTML, PLAIN, ASCII, LATEX and COMPUTER. HTML produces web pages, PLAIN produces plain text files, and ASCII is the same as PLAIN except that it uses all ASCII characters (no accents etc.) if possible. (This is because some applications don't understand accented characters - for example, they're not always reliable over email). LATEX produces LaTeX code which can be turned into beautiful Postscipt if you have LaTeX and dvips installed. (Yes, I know it gives overfull hboxes sometimes). COMPUTER is a special format suitable for reading by a computer (useful for reading into a spreadsheet, or post-processing with a graphics package, for example). There is a separate section about this format later.

As well as a command like

OUTPUT PLAIN

you can also select PLAIN style with the command line argument +a, and HTML with the command line argument -a. You can also specify OUTPUT NONE for no output, if you are producing a cache file.

Next, you can change the language of the output. There are two ways to do this. The usual way is to use the LANGUAGE command. For example, the command

LANGUAGE FRENCH

will give you the output in French. The available languages at the moment are ARMENIAN, BULGARIAN (Windows-1251), BULGARIAN-MIK (MIK-16), CATALAN, TRAD-CHINESE (Big5), CZECH (ISO Latin 2), CZECH-1250 (Windows-1250), DANISH, DUTCH, ENGLISH, US-ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, HUNGARIAN, ITALIAN, JAPANESE-EUC (EUC-JP), JAPANESE-JIS (ISO-2022-JP), JAPANESE-SJIS (SJIS), JAPANESE-UTF (UTF-8), KOREAN, LATVIAN, NORWEGIAN (Bokmål), NYNORSK, POLISH, PORTUGUESE, BR-PORTUGUESE, SERBIAN, SLOVENE (ISO Latin 2), SLOVENE-1250 (Windows-1250), SPANISH, SWEDISH, SWEDISH-ALT (alternative translation avoiding Anglicisms), TURKISH and UKRAINIAN.

The following languages were available for previous versions of analog, but have not yet been translated for version 5: BOSNIAN, SIMP-CHINESE (GB2312), CROATIAN, FINNISH, GREEK, ICELANDIC, LITHUANIAN, ROMANIAN, RUSSIAN and SLOVAK. I hope that they will be available soon, and as soon as they are, they will be added to the analog home page.

The other way to specify a language is to use the LANGFILE command. This is useful if you want to download a new language from the analog home page, or if you want to translate one yourself, or even if you want to change some words or phrases or the way the dates and times are formatted in the output. The LANGFILE command tells analog in which file to find the various words and phrases for a new language. For example, the command

LANGFILE guarani.lng   # or
LANGFILE /usr/etc/httpd/analog/lang/guarani.lng

would read from that file. If the name of the file doesn't include a directory, it will be looked for wherever analog normally expects to find its language files.

Some languages also have domains files or report descriptions files available. These are normally selected automatically by the LANGUAGE command. But you can tell analog to use different ones with the DOMAINSFILE and DESCFILE commands. Also, some languages have translations of the form interface or configuration file.

If you want to translate another language, I would be delighted! Do contact me first to make sure that no-one else is already translating the same language. The file README.txt in the language directory, and the English language file, contain some brief instructions for translating new languages.

You can change which file the output goes to with a command like

OUTFILE stats.htm

or with a command line argument like +Ostats.htm. If you use the filename - or stdout, the output will go to standard output, which is normally the screen, but Unix users might like to redirect it to another file or even into a pipe. You can also use an absolute path name, like

OUTFILE /usr/bin/httpd/htdocs/stats.html  # Unix
OUTFILE "Hard Disk:Server Apps:WebSTAR:Analog:Report.html" # Mac

If the name of the OUTFILE doesn't include a directory, it will be put wherever analog expects to put its output files. (This location is built in when the program is compiled.) For example, on Windows it would be in the same folder as the analog executable.

Sometimes it's convenient to include the date in the name of the OUTFILE. You can do this by including the following codes in the filename.

%D  date of month
%m  month name
%M  month number
%y  two-digit year
%Y  four-digit year
%H  hour
%n  minute
%w  day of week

So for example,

OUTFILE stats%y%M.html

will produce filenames like stats9905.html. The date used is the TO date if one was specified, and otherwise the time of the start of the program. It's always in English.

Next, you need to know how to turn the different reports on and off. There are 44 different reports which analog can produce, if your web server has been configured to record the necessary data in the logfiles. Each one has a short name, and a code letter or number, as follows. (Note that the code letters are case sensitive: Z is quite different from z, for example).

x  GENERAL         General Summary
1  YEARLY          Yearly Report
Q  QUARTERLY       Quarterly Report
m  MONTHLY         Monthly Report
W  WEEKLY          Weekly Report
D  DAILYREP        Daily Report
d  DAILYSUM        Daily Summary
H  HOURLYREP       Hourly Report
h  HOURLYSUM       Hourly Summary
w  WEEKHOUR        Hour of the Week Summary
4  QUARTERREP      Quarter-Hour Report
6  QUARTERSUM      Quarter-Hour Summary
5  FIVEREP         Five-Minute Report
7  FIVESUM         Five-Minute Summary
S  HOST            Host Report
l  REDIRHOST       Host Redirection Report
L  FAILHOST        Host Failure Report
Z  ORGANISATION    Organisation Report
o  DOMAIN          Domain Report
r  REQUEST         Request Report
i  DIRECTORY       Directory Report
t  FILETYPE        File Type Report
z  SIZE            File Size Report
P  PROCTIME        Processing Time Report
E  REDIR           Redirection Report
I  FAILURE         Failure Report
f  REFERRER        Referrer Report
s  REFSITE         Referring Site Report
N  SEARCHQUERY     Search Query Report
n  SEARCHWORD      Search Word Report
Y  INTSEARCHQUERY  Internal Search Query Report
y  INTSEARCHWORD   Internal Search Word Report
k  REDIRREF        Redirected Referrer Report
K  FAILREF         Failed Referrer Report
B  BROWSERREP      Browser Report
b  BROWSERSUM      Browser Summary
p  OSREP           Operating System Report
v  VHOST           Virtual Host Report
R  REDIRVHOST      Virtual Host Redirection Report
M  FAILVHOST       Virtual Host Failure Report
u  USER            User Report
j  REDIRUSER       User Redirection Report
J  FAILUSER        User Failure Report
c  STATUS          Status Code Report

For details on what the various reports mean, and a summary of the commands which control them, see the section on Analog's reports.

You can turn each report on or off with configuration commands like

FIVEREP OFF
REFSITE ON

or by using command line arguments like -5 and +s. You can also turn all reports except the General Summary on or off with the commands ALL ON and ALL OFF, or with the command line arguments +A and -A.

You can turn the descriptions of each report off with the command

DESCRIPTIONS OFF

Even if DESCRIPTIONS is ON, the descriptions will only appear if analog can find a report descriptions file in your language, or if you specify one using the DESCFILE command: for example,

DESCFILE descriptions.txt

If the name of the descriptions file doesn't include a directory, it will be looked for wherever analog normally expects to find its language files.

You can turn the "Go To" lines in the report off with the command

GOTOS OFF

GOTOS ON turns them on again, and GOTOS FEW puts the "Go To" lines just at the top and bottom. GOTOS OFF can be abbreviated with the -X command line argument, and GOTOS ON with +X.

You can turn off the "Program started at" line at the top of the report, and the "Running Time" line at the bottom, with the command

RUNTIME OFF

and turn them on again with RUNTIME ON.

The figures in parentheses in the General Summary are for the last seven days: either the seven days before the TO time, or if no TO time is given, the seven days before the time of the program start. The figures for the last seven days are normally included if some, but not all, of the requests fall in those seven days; but you can turn them off by means of the command

LASTSEVEN OFF

Of course LASTSEVEN ON turns them on again.

You can change the order of the reports by means of the REPORTORDER command. You should list the code letters for all possible reports in the order you want them. Non-alphanumeric characters are ignored and so can be used as separators. For example,

REPORTORDER x-1QmdDhHw4567W-cPz-ritEIYy-SlLZo-sNnfKk-ujJ-vMR-bBp

You can turn the lines in General Summary on and off individually using the GENSUMLINES command. The default is

GENSUMLINES ALL

meaning all available lines. You can turn lines off using a command like

GENSUMLINES -KL

(to turn off lines K & L) and turn them on again with a command like

GENSUMLINES +K

You can specify the exact set of lines to include with a command like

GENSUMLINES CDFGHM

You now just need to know which lines have which code letters, which is given in the following table.

: Successful requests (always listed)
B: Average successful requests per day
C: Logfile lines without status code
D: Successful requests for pages
E: Average successful requests for pages per day
F: Failed requests
G: Redirected requests
H: Requests with informational status code
I: Distinct files requested
J: Distinct hosts served
K: Corrupt logfile lines
L: Unwanted logfile entries
M: Data transferred
N: Average data transferred per day

There is a command called IMAGEDIR which tells analog where the various images used to make the report should live. It should be a URL, not the actual location on your disk, and it should include the final slash. For example, you could have

IMAGEDIR img/   # relative URL: within the same directory as the output
IMAGEDIR /img/  # off the root directory of your server
IMAGEDIR http://www.myother.server.com/img/  # on another server

Some people are confused about the IMAGEDIR. It's just put in the <img> tags in the output. You can see its effect if you look at the HTML source of the output page.

You can use png images instead of gif's by specifying

PNGIMAGES ON

This is off by default because browser support for png's is still disappointingly weak, so it produces worse output on many browsers. This decision may change in the future though.

There are three commands which affect the top line of the output. First, the LOGO command allows you to replace the analog logo with another image (for example, your organisation's logo). You can say

LOGO picture.gif  # for this file
LOGO /images/picture2.gif  # a different file
LOGO none         # for no logo

The logo is assumed to be inside the IMAGEDIR unless it starts with a slash, or contains ://

There are commands HOSTNAME and HOSTURL which affect the name and link at the end of the title line. For example, I might specify

HOSTNAME "Stephen Turner"
HOSTURL  http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/

to generate the title "Web Server Statistics for Stephen Turner". Again, you can use none as the HOSTURL to specify no link. Analog will normally translate characters in the hostname to HTML if necessary. So to include literal HTML, such as accented characters, in the output you need to precede them by a backslash, like this:

HOSTNAME "M\&uuml;ller & S\&ouml;hne"

There are commands called HEADERFILE and FOOTERFILE. These let you specify files to be inserted near the top and bottom of your output. You can also specify

HEADERFILE none

to cancel a previously-specified header file. Again, if the name of the HEADERFILE or FOOTERFILE doesn't include a directory, it will put in a canonical location, specified when the program was compiled.

There is a command called STYLESHEET to specify a style sheet for the output. This allows you to specify colours etc. (See http://www.w3.org/Style/css/ for how to write a style sheet.) For example,

STYLESHEET /housestyle.css
STYLESHEET none   # to cancel it

Hint: a common mistake in writing style sheets is to declare a font-family for the body, but then not put <pre> sections back into a monospaced font. This stops the columns lining up properly. Your style sheet should contain a line like the following:

PRE, TT, CODE, KBD, SAMP { font-family: monospace }

There are three related commands called SEPCHAR, REPSEPCHAR and DECPOINT. These specify single characters to be used as the thousands separator in numbers, the thousands separator within the columns in the reports, and the decimal point. Normally, these will be set automatically for the language you choose, but you can change them if you want. For example, a French user might choose

SEPCHAR " "
REPSEPCHAR none
DECPOINT ,

to make "three thousand and a quarter" look like "3 000,25" in text and "3000,25" in the reports.

There is a command called RAWBYTES. Specify RAWBYTES ON if you want the exact number of bytes to be listed in reports, or RAWBYTES OFF if you want the number of kilobytes or Megabytes as appropriate to be listed instead.

There are commands called HTMLPAGEWIDTH, PLAINPAGEWIDTH and LATEXPLAINWIDTH which specify the width of the page. Which one is used depends on whethere the output style is HTML, PLAIN (including ASCII), or LATEX. The output is not guaranteed to fit in this width, but analog will take notice of it when choosing the width of the time graphs, when sorting the host report alphabetically, when drawing horizontal rules, and when writing some bits of text.

There is a command called NOROBOTS which stops robots which obey the robots META tag from indexing your output page or following its links. Normally this is set to ON but you can specify NOROBOTS OFF if you don't mind robots finding your other pages this way. Note that you will stop far more robots if you also put your stats page in your robots.txt file; on the other hand, this file has to be kept up to date by the server administrator.

Sometimes your server is not in the same timezone as you, or at least records the times in its logfiles in a different timezone (for example GMT). So that you can get your statistics in your local time, there is a command called LOGTIMEOFFSET to change the time by a certain number of minutes. As with the LOGFORMAT command, this only affects logfiles which come later in the same configuration file.

You have to be careful using this command. Because of daylight savings time in operation in different parts of the world at different times, analog cannot attempt to convert between different timezones. So it's your responsibility to set the right offset for different times of year. For example, if you were in Chicago, but your server was recording time in GMT, you would need to specify two different time offsets, one of minus five hours for summer and one of minus six hours for winter. You would need to split your logfiles in the right places and then run commands like

LOGTIMEOFFSET -300
LOGFILE summer*.log
LOGTIMEOFFSET -360
LOGFILE winter*.log

There is also a related command called TIMEOFFSET. This tells analog how much to offset the time of the computer on which it is running (rather than the computer running the server), to get your local time.

In the following sections we shall look at some commands for configuring the output of particular reports, under the following headings: Time reports, Other reports and Hierarchical reports.

Go to the analog home page.

Stephen Turner
07 July 2001

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