On Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:45 PM [GMT], Emil Pedersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...] > >>> Lastly, could someone recommend some relatively cheap third party >>> tracking system (pixel tracking?) that we can use for a month of two >>> to verify if your logging system is not working properly? >> >> If you find a discrepancy between a 3rd party system and your own log >> files, the one thing that you can know with 100% certainty is that >> the problem is with the 3rd party system. Don't waste your time. > > While this is of course true, you can not always trust the content of > your logfiles to reflect reality. E.g. apache have some known bugs[1] > that will render your statistics way to high and thus useless in some > cases and I've seem similar behavior with proftpd. It puts _way_ to > high (exabyte) values in the "bytes sent" field of the log, but I have > not found it to be a confirmed bug. > > So if your statistics differ from your log files, then it is obviously > the analyzers fault. > > If it differ from what makes sense however, it may be (has been in my > case) the fault of the program generating the logs. The Apache bug you reference is what you might reasonably call an exception - if aborted transfers make up a significant proportion of your logfile entries, then you probably have bigger problems than a discrepancy in your logs. (If you're being charged for bandwidth, and you have a very large file available for download that is cancelled a lot, then you might care). But there's no way that any 3rd party "web bug" can give you anything at all about the bandwidth used by your site, so it's not much of a counter argument. Web bugs are always going to give you an approximation at best - try sticking 3 web bugs from 3 different "web statistcis tracking" services on your website, and you'll see just how "approximate" they are! Aengus +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list: | http://lists.meer.net/mailman/listinfo/analog-help | | Usenet version: news://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.analog.general | List archives: http://www.analog.cx/docs/mailing.html#listarchives +------------------------------------------------------------------------
