Garrett Bartley ([EMAIL PROTECTED]; Thursday, June 27, 2002 10:32 AM):
> Okay, this may be a little off topic but I still consider it being help... > Analog (with a little help from Report Magic) produces the best > stats anyone could hope for with trend and market analysis, but how > much trust should I put into for purposes of billing customers based > on data transfer? I'm not being skeptical about analog, I just > wanted to know if others are using it for billing purposes as well. > I'm working for a quite successful startup and we've been looking > around at different packages and I've been working on writing my own > to keep us going for the time being. The numbers vary slightly from > analog (like maybe a couple hundred MB for 50+ GB transfers over a > month). Of course, my program could be wrong (probably is). > So, what do you think? Do you use it for billing stats? Should I? Analog produces the most accurate statistics of any program, for what it measures: the data in your log files. If you want to bill on the size of files requested by web site visitors then Analog will be accurate. However, the data in your web log files does not include the entire byte count of traffic over the medium. Web logs traditionally only include bytes sent, which does not include the headers and tcp wrappers. While you can add bytes received to some logs, Analog doesn't total it, so your Analog counts do not include the size of requests. Both of these are usually negligible in size, as you have noticed. However, cookies can often increase the size of the headers significantly (depending on how they are used) and any file-upload fields will greatly increase the request size. Analog also only reads the web logs. Not ftp logs, email logs, dns lookups, etc. So whether to use Analog for data transfer depends on the type of data being moved over your network. MRTG (http://www.mrtg.org/) can provide more accurate bandwidth usage statistics. It's very powerful, but might be complicated to separate traffic depending on virtual hosts. You'll have to do some work with it and see what you can come up with. YMMV -- Jeremy Wadsack Wadsack-Allen Digital Group +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this | mailing list, go to | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/unsubscribe.html | | List archives are available at | http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/archives/ | http://www.tallylist.com/archives/index.cfm/mlist.7 +------------------------------------------------------------------------
