Tracking Users -- Ideas
list James Wade
Hello All, I'd like to be able to graph the number of users connecting to a web-site. I was wondering if any one had any good ideas or if something had already been written. Basically, I want to track the number of users connecting to a web-site by looking at the log-file, and I'd like to graph it. The log-file looks like this: 192.168.0.22 - user07 [20/Aug/2007:08:49:49 -0500] "GET /htdocs/info/wd.html So, it shows all the web pages the user accesses. What I really want to know is how many users are currently connecting through to the web-site. I could cat the log file out every minute, grab the username, do a sort unique based on the IP address and Username, then do a count, and graph it. But I don't know that it would be very accurate. The logfile rotates every 2mb, so I'd have to do a grep of all the files based on date and time, then do a sort on IP address and Username. I also want to put some checks in, for example, same username with more than one IP address, reverse lookup of the IP based on location, ie..our users should only be in the U.S., and not somewhere else. Any suggestions? Thanks.James
list Ralph Mitchell
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On Jan 24, 2008 10:52 AM, James Wade <user-659655b2ea05@xymon.invalid> wrote:
Hello All, I'd like to be able to graph the number of users connecting to a web-site. I was wondering if any one had any good ideas or if something had already been written. Basically, I want to track the number of users connecting to a web-site by looking at the log-file, and I'd like to graph it. The log-file looks like this: 192.168.0.22 - user07 [20/Aug/2007:08:49:49 -0500] "GET /htdocs/info/wd.html So, it shows all the web pages the user accesses. What I really want to know is how many users are currently connecting through to the web-site. I could cat the log file out every minute, grab the username, do a sort unique based on the IP address and Username, then do a count, and graph it. But I don't know that it would be very accurate. The logfile rotates every 2mb, so I'd have to do a grep of all the files based on date and time, then do a sort on IP address and Username. I also want to put some checks in, for example, same username with more than one IP address, reverse lookup of the IP based on location, ie….our users should only be in the U.S., and not somewhere else.
Dunno if/how it could be integrated into Hobbit, but I think Webalizer ( http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) does exactly what you're looking for. Ralph Mitchell
list Martin Ward
Hi James, Tracking users of a website is a little tricky unless you actually have them logging in and out. Most websites are not stateful, which is to say you do not have the concept of a user being logged in; the user connects, downloads a webpage from your site and disconnects. Your example:
The log-file looks like this:
192.168.0.22 - user07 [20/Aug/2007:08:49:49 -0500] "GET
/htdocs/info/wd.html shows a user ID so presumably you have some kind of authentication, but do you have a "logoff" button and are your users forced to use it? Or can they simply authenticate, download the data and then close their web browser?
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So, it shows all the web pages the user accesses. What I really want to know
is how many users are currently connecting through to the web-site.
How can you define "Currently"? If you mean "How many people are
currently download webpages from my website and if you are running a
unix machines then you can use the "netstat -an" command and find all
connections that are connected to your local port 80 (or whichever port
your web server runs on).
|\/|artin
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list James Wade
Webalizer does do a lot of what I'm looking to do. However, I want to be able to have the number of users and hits traced through Hobbit so that I can pull up metric graphs and compare to CPU, Memory, Networks, etc.., This will allow me to compare hardware usage with the number of users accessing the infrastructure for future growth and performance analysis. James
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From: Ralph Mitchell [mailto:user-00a5e44c48c0@xymon.invalid] Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 11:03 AM To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid Subject: Re: [hobbit] Tracking Users -- Ideas Dunno if/how it could be integrated into Hobbit, but I think Webalizer (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) does exactly what you're looking for. Ralph Mitchell