There are many, many, many threads in the archives (see the bottom of the email) covering the topic of sessions. There are pro- and con-arguments. There are some strongly differing opinions out there.
As more and more sites implement applications that track states, it has become increasingly popular to say, "well, but if my site *does* track sessions, why can't Analog handle that." Stephen's (and other's) responses usually include, "session tracking is best done in the session application, not the logs;" "even if one server has absolutely accurate sessions (say it only allows authenticated users) that doesn't mean that Analog knows;" and, as I said before, "Analog doesn't handle multi-variate reports (http://analog.cx/docs/faq.html#faq128)." In short, you can't get session length or path reports from Analog. Not with out major revisions to the source code. If you want to figure out session length, you can probably write a script to handle that. It should not be too hard to parse the log file and find each session, tally when it started and when it ended, then sort by longest to shortest, or whatever. You could use this same script to investigate a single session for customer calls. As for finding customers who access only one type of information, that is a more complicated problem. You would need to define what requests constitute "sports content" and then tally all sessions that that include only this. That could be very memory intensive, but again, a separate script or process might be useful. Now, I am still not convinced that you have definite sessions in your system. You have only two hosts, so that's not a valid session identifier. Each host can handle up to 30 concurrent sessions. What identifies the sessions? You said a cookie or a URL key, but what does it reference? If it only relates to the modem, then all you really have is a proxy. Can you define it to create a new, unique session ID when the user calls and expire that ID when the user hangs up? How do you plan to persist these across sessions (e.g. for discounts to the top 100 longest sessions)? If you use the incoming telephone number, you cannot be sure that the phone number is always the same user. Most phones are shared. What about public phones (pay phones or concierge services)? While Analog won't produce the reports you want, there may be other options. If you are able to create an accurate session identifier (or are comfortable with the approximation) I can think of a handful of commercial applications that will produce reports including visit-length and path-analysis. These are marketing-oriented applications whereas Analog is a log-analysis tool. There may be a place for both in your enterprise. -- Jeremy Wadsack Wadsack-Allen Digital Group Eric Paschoalick Chaves ([EMAIL PROTECTED]; Tuesday, January 07, 2003 7:05 AM): > Hi Jeremy, > Thanks for the reply. I'd like to discuss this topic a little > bit, if you don't mind. Althought I agree with you (and with the > statements at Analog's readme - What you can't know) about how track > your vistor's path, sessions and others in a public web enviroment, If I > could use cookies or other trick it may be possible do it (I'm not sure, > that's why I wish to go a litle deeper here). For that I'd like to > expose the enviroment of VXML applications: > VoiceXML portals work like this, I have one machine that expose > VXML pages trought a normal web server, in my case IIS. Also I have two > client's machines, and only this two clients can access the web server, > it isn't public nor have any proxies between then, since they are always > on the same LAN. Each machine has a telephone card wich can handle up to > 30 calls at the same time. Each call is handle by an instance of a > executable called voice browser wich is nothing more then a browser that > only accept VXML pages. The browser works fine with cookies and > ECMAScript and all session control is left to the web server, like > normal public web servers does. > Once a call is picked, the browser starts requesting pages to > the server and there is no way (in my case) to the user go away to > another web server and then come back. If he hangup and call again (wich > will be similar in action to someone closing his Internet Explorer and > apening again) he will start from the beginning (the start page) always. > As you can see, although this enviroment being similar to a > public web server, it is much more restrictive. That's why I'm betting > that tricks like cookies and other stuffs may work to allow me with job > of tracking the user's path. > Most of reports that I need is common to web servers (most > visited content, hour of peek, flow of peek during the week/month and so > on) and normal programs anylizer programs will work fine. The main > problem is that sometimes wee need a few more specific information for > marking stuff, ie: We use to make some sport offers for those phone > numbers that always access sport contents, or provide a discount to the > 100 phone numbers tha has spent more time accessing the portal. Alos, > from time to time, I have users complaing that they haven't used so much > time in a call for the portal. In this case I have to track on my logs > the respective call and check for it's path to see how much time it > really has. For those kind of reports that I wish to know if is possible > to use some trick with Analogs to get it. Even if I can't get the path > (I may do it manualy in the log file) do you belive that is possible to > get the other reports? > Once again thanks for the time. > Cheers, > Eric. >> Analog was designed to handle HTTP which does not include any >> service for tracking state. With caches, proxies and such it >> is impossible to exactly determine which web requests came >> from which users. Therefore Analog does not attempt to >> estimate this. See http://analog.cx/docs/webworks.html for >> the complete argument. >> >> I don't know much about how VoiceXML servers handle requests and state >> (session) management, but in any case, you can usually >> "hijack" one of the variables (say %u of you have not >> authenticated users) by writing your own log format so it is >> used to track cookies. Then you can use the User report to >> get a count of sessions. You can't get a list of paths for >> the other reasons listed in the above document and due to >> memory / processing constraints mentioned in FAQ item > http://analog.cx/docs/faq.html#faq128. +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | This is the analog-help mailing list. 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