Express Analysis

This article provides general information about Express Analysis and also describes how to can set up log files for Express Analysis.

What Is Express Analysis?

Express Analysis delivers an up-to-date snapshot of the current day’s data long before standard Webtrends analysis can provide final statistics. Express Analysis allows you to check statistics throughout the day. Using a copy of your SmartSource Data Collector (SDC) data files, Express Analysis collects data every 60 seconds and renders it into a compact form to save costly processing time. Express Analysis is especially useful for daily tactical decisions. It provides a quick view of how your web site is performing overall, giving you general status indicators and clues about where to investigate further. For example, Express Analysis can provide up-to-the-moment feedback during a major sales event such as a holiday promotion. Because you don’t have to wait for an entire day’s data to be rolled up and analyzed, you can respond to visitor events on your site hour by hour, identifying problems and opportunities as they occur.

Benefits of Express Analysis

Express Analysis provides:

• Fast access to your most important analyses, before daily reports are rolled up
• Regular updates to your critical metrics throughout the day
• Close monitoring and response capability

Limitations of Express Analysis

Webtrends Analytics clearly labels features and selections such as profile settings, custom reports, and filters that are not compatible with Express Analysis. If an object such as a filter or a filter component is incompatible with Express Analysis, the object cannot be used with Express Analysis.

Some limitations of Express Analysis include:

• Express Analysis can only be used to analyze SmartSource Data Collector files.
• Express Analysis does not support Basic Parent Child Profiles.
• Express Analysis does not support regular expressions.
• Express Analysis does not support Custom Reports with more than one dimension.
• Express Analysis supports a limited set of dimensions, measures, and filters. Webtrends Administration clearly specifies objects that are compliant with Express Analysis support.

Comparing Express Analysis with Standard Analysis

Although Express Analysis reports on the same SmartSource Data Collector data as standard Webtrends analysis, you should think of Express Analysis as a supplement to standard analysis rather than a replacement. Because it is designed to deliver a quick view of your data, Express Analysis does not provide the full depth and accuracy required for long-term business analysis, and it does not support the full range of features available with Webtrends Analytics. For long-term strategic decisions, you should use standard Webtrends analysis for in-depth data drilldown. For information about how to configure an Express Analysis profile, see “Enabling Express Analysis on a Profile,” below.

Comparing Express Analysis with Real-Time Insight Data

Both Express Analysis and Insight can provide rapid feedback on your site data. You can use either method or both methods to report on the same profiles. However, they supply different types of data. In contrast to Express Analysis data, which provides report-based, customizable, in-depth statistics, Insight real-time data provides:

• High-level performance metrics
• Threshold alerting
• Overlay of significant timeline events

To summarize, Insight’s real-time reporting is optimized for visually tracking short-term response to campaigns. Express Analysis is the best choice for detailed, customized reporting on short-term site activity. For example, using an RSS overlay, you can easily track response trends in Insight to see whether a blog post resulted in increased visits or page views. However, these are overview statistics. To evaluate traffic to content groups based on the same events, you can use Express Analysis with the Content Group reports.

How Express Analysis Works

Webtrends Express Analysis provides constantly updatable reporting based on SmartSource Data Collector files. To provide these quick updates, Express Analysis analyzes copies of your SmartSource files located on the same computer as the Express Analysis Engine. As new log data becomes available, it is copied to the Express Analysis source directory. The Express Analysis Engine processes it into a new file format with a .prt extension, which provides the data for Express Analysis reports. The original copied log file data is deleted as soon as Webtrends converts it to .prt format.

How often you move new data to the Express Analysis log file source location determines how often your report data can be updated. You can use the Webtrends PRT Mover Utility to move new log file data to the Express Analysis source directory as soon as it becomes available. By default, the PRT Mover Utility checks for new log file data once per minute. You can change the PRT Mover setting by editing the following file and changing sleep=60 to the new value in seconds.

Webtrends Installation Directory\modules\prtmover\wtprtmover.ini

Interpreting Express Analysis Reports

If you compare Express Analysis report data with data from standard Webtrends Analytics reports, you should expect some differences in results, even when you compare data for the same time period. These differences occur because Express Analysis uses different methods of data collection in order to provide fast results. For example, standard Webtrends standard analysis identifies visitor sessions using the tracking methods specified in the Session Tracking settings, which can include cookies, authenticated user name, and other criteria. Express Analysis identifies the start of a visit by tracking a specific data tag which requires an enabled browser cookie. Thus, because Express Analysis can only track visits for visitors whose browsers accept cookies, visit counts tend to be lower in Express Analysis reports.

Express Analysis reports typically also include data from standard Webtrends analysis. For example, if you include reports that are not Express Analysis-compliant in your report template, Webtrends populates these reports with available data from standard analysis. Webtrends identifies reports and report elements based on Express Analysis by labeling them with the Express Analysis icon. The Express Analysis icon is displayed in the report Table of Contents next to each report that contains Express Analysis data. Within reports, the Express Analysis icon is displayed next to each report graph and table that is based on Express Analysis data.

Express Analysis Requirements

This section provides an overview of the components and steps you need to set up Express Analysis for a Webtrends software installation.

To use Express Analysis, you need to:

1. Install the Express Analysis engine component.

2. Use the SmartSource Data Collector (SDC).

   Note

   Express Analysis is only supported with SDC installed in a Windows environment. SDC for Unix does not support Express Analysis.

3. Define an SDC data source in Webtrends Administration based on the location of your SmartSource Data Collector data files.

4. Tag the pages on your site with the Webtrends JavaScript tag containing the unique DCSID for the data source.

5. Create an SDC site map using your new DCSID.

6. Configure SDC to:

   • Use hosted mode.
   • Enable dual logging. With dual logging, SDC creates a copy of the log file for Express Analysis as well as a copy for standard analysis.

7. Configure the Webtrends Mover utility with the correct source and destination information to move SmartSource Data Collector log files to the location where Webtrends will analyze them.

8. Enable the Webtrends - Mover service.

9. Create a profile based on your SDC data source and enable Express Analysis (located in the General section of the Analysis Options).

Currently, Webtrends Analytics does not support multiple Express Analysis engines in a distributed installation.

Installing the Express Analysis Engine

You can install the Express Analysis Engine on a separate computer from other Webtrends Analytics components or on the same computer. The Express Analysis computer should have at least enough disk space for a day’s worth of log file records. You install the Express Analysis Engine using the same executable link used to install Webtrends.

To install the Express Analysis Engine, choose the following options during Webtrends installation:

1. In the Select Install Type dialog, choose Custom.

2. In the Custom Setup dialog, expand Analysis and click Express Analysis Engine.

3. Select Install or Maintain This Component from the list.

4. In the Specify Express Analysis Locations dialog, specify the locations for your Express Analysis data as follows:

   • In the Express Analysis Log Source text box, specify the location on the Express Analysis computer where you will provide a copy of your SmartSource Data Collector log files as the source for Express Analysis. By default, the Express Analysis engine looks for log files in the Webtrends Installation Directory\modules\expressanalysis\src directory.
   • In the Express Analysis Report Data Repository text box, specify the location where you want the Express Analysis Engine to store the .prt files used to create Express Analysis reports.
   Note

   Unless you run all Webtrends components on the same computer, you should specify a UNC path to a shared network location. Make sure all Webtrends components have access rights to this location.

Defining an SDC Data Source

Creating an SDC data source in Webtrends Administration generates a JavaScript tag containing the unique DCSID for your site. Express Analysis uses this tag to link Express Analysis data back to the data source you create. If you have already defined an SDC data source, and you know your DCSID, you can skip this step. If you have defined an SDC data source and you need to know your DCSID, you can look at the data source in Edit mode in Webtrends Administration to find the DCSID.

To create an SDC data source:

1. In the left pane, click Administration > Application Settings > Data Sources.

2. Click New.

3. In the Data Source Type dialog, select Web: SmartSource Data Files.

4. Identify the location of your SmartSource Data Collector data files. Use the location you would identify for standard Webtrends analysis, not the location you identified as a source when installing the Express Analysis engine.

5. Provide information about the time zone for the data file.

6. In the SmartSource Site ID dialog, click Generate a new SmartSource Site ID and specify the IP address of the SmartSource Data Collector.

7. In the SmartSource Data Collector dialog, copy the Webtrends Javascript tag, or click Download this tag to save it in a text file.

8. Save the data source.

Tagging Your Site with the DCSID

To ensure that the DCSID is included whenever you log activity on your site, you need to tag every page on your site with the Webtrends JavaScript tag you generated. You can insert the JavaScript tag anywhere on your Web page between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags, but as a best practice we recommend placing it near the top of the Web page. There are several methods for including the JavaScript tag on your site pages. For more information, see “Client-Side JavaScript Integration” in the Webtrends Implementation and Maintenance Guide.

Creating an SDC Site Map

To enable Express Analysis, you need to create a site map file that contains the DCSID for your SDC data source. If you have more than one SDC server, create a site map using the same DCSID for each SDC server. The site map is required to enable dual logging for Express Analysis and link it with the DCSID. Enabling dual logging instructs SDC to create two copies of the log file, one for standard analysis, and the other for Express Analysis. Dual logging allows Webtrends to rotate and move data more quickly for Express Analysis.

To create an SDC site map:

1. Open the webtrendssites.lst file located in the SDC installation directory\cfg directory.

2. Copy the following line of code for each domain/data source that you want to track. If you have only one data source that you want to track, do not create additional lines of code.
   dcs5w0txb10000wocrvqy1nqm_6n1p, -5, 1, NULL, 1, 1

   Each line of code represents a single data source.

3. Replace dcs5w0txb10000wocrvqy1nqm_6n1p with the DCSID of your SDC data source.

4. Replace -5 with the time zone of your Web server. Specify a value between -12 and 12 that corresponds to the GMT offset of your Web server. For example, the time zone for Pacific Standard Time is -8.

5. Increment the value of the third field for each DCSID you specify. For example, if you have two DCSIDs, you would modify the third field in the following manner:

   DCSID1, TIMEZONE, 1, NULL, 1, 1
DCSID2, TIMEZONE, 2, NULL, 1, 1

6. Change NULL in the enabled line of code so that the line reads as follows:

   DCSID, TIMEZONE, 1, 'express', 1, 1

7. If you want to prevent SDC from setting cookies for a specific data source, change the fifth field value to 0. You can use this setting to override the global setting that disables cookies in the SDC configuration file, dcs.cfg. By default, cookies are enabled, which is specified by a value of 1. You should only disable cookies if your organization’s policy does not allow visitors to be identified using cookies.

8. If you want to configure session-only cookies for a specific data source, change the sixth field value to 2. You can use this setting to override the global setting that configures cookie persistence in the SDC configuration file, dcs.cfg. By default, cookies generated by SDC are persistent specified by a value of 1.

Configuring SDC

Because logs cannot be analyzed while SDC is writing data to the log file, SDC periodically changes the files to which it writes. This is known as log rotation. You can use the SDC configuration file to adjust how often SDC rotates both Express Analysis and standard log files and to specify the directories where SDC writes the log files.

Because Express Analysis requires frequent updates to log file data, the default frequency for rotating the Express Analysis log files is every 5 minutes. The default log file rotation frequency for standard SDC log files is every 60 minutes.

To configure SDC for Express Analysis:

1. In the SDC installation directory\cfg directory, open the dcs.cfg file.

2. If you want to change how often SDC rotates Express Analysis log files, uncomment the rotationraterealtime parameter by removing the # and specify a rotation interval in minutes. Valid values are 1-6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. By default, SDC rotates Express Analysis log files every 5 minutes. This setting does not affect how often standard SDC log files are rotated.

3. If you want to change the location where SDC stores Express Analysis log files, change the value for realtimelogfiledir by removing the # and specify a new directory. By default, SDC stores Express Analysis log files in the SDC Installation Directory\realtime directory.

   Note

   The %WT_ROOT% macro is automatically populated with the SDC installation directory (not the Webtrends installation directory).

4. If you want to change how often SDC rotates standard log files, uncomment the rotationratestandardlag parameter by removing the # and specify a rotation interval in minutes. Valid values are 60, 120, 240, 360, 720, and 1440. By default, SDC rotates standard log files every 60 minutes. This setting does not affect how often Express Analysis log files are rotated.

5. If you want to change the location where SDC stores standard log files, find the [logrotation] section of the dcs.cfg file and change the value for the logfiledir parameter by specifying a new directory. By default, SDC stores standard log files in the SDC Installation Directory\weblog directory.

   Note

   The %WT_ROOT% macro is automatically populated with the SDC installation directory (not the Webtrends installation directory).

Configuring the Webtrends Mover

The Webtrends Mover utility moves new log file data from the SDC computer to the Express Analysis computer. You can configure the Webtrends Mover using the settings in the wtmover.ini.distrib file. When you make changes, we recommend saving a copy of this file named simply mover.ini. You should retain the original mover.ini.distrib file in case you want to return the mover to its original settings. After creating mover.ini, make all future changes to this file and not to mover.ini.distrib.

The mover.ini.distrib file is located on the server where the Webtrends UI is installed, in the following directory: Webtrends installation directory\modules\mover

To configure the source and destination for Express Analysis log files:

1. In the Webtrends installation directory\modules\mover directory, open the mover.ini file.
2. In the [wtmover1] section, locate the following lines of code:

# Move Express Analysis logs from:
# sourcepath=\\sourcemachine\sourcepath\
# sourcepath1=ftp://sourcemachine2\sourcepath\
# sourceusername1=sourceuser
# sourcepassword1=sourcepass
sourcepath=D:\Program Files\Webtrends\modules\sdc\realtime

# Move Express Analysis logs to:
# destinationpath=\\destmachine\destpath\
# destinationpath1=\\destmachine2\destpath\
destinationpath=D:\Program Files\Webtrends\modules\expressanalysis\src

3. Uncomment the lines you want to use for configuration by removing the #.

4. If necessary, replace the uncommented SourcePath value with the path to the Express Analysis log file as specified in the servicemodel section of dcs.cfg. By default, this parameter is populated with the following path when you install Webtrends: Webtrends Installation Directory\modules\sdc\realtime. If you installed SDC in a different location or on another computer, you need to modify the path.

5. If your data resides in more than one location, add additional lines with information for SourcePath1, SourcePath2, and so on.

6. If you specified a secure FTP (SFTP) server for a SourcePath parameter, replace sourceuser and sourcepass with the login information for an account that has rights to the SFTP server. Make sure you number the sourceusername and sourcepassword parameters to match the SourcePath parameter associated with the login. For example, SourcePath1 should use sourceusername1 and sourcepassword1.

If necessary, replace the uncommented DestinationPath variable with the path to the location on the Express Analysis computer where you want to make new log file data available. By default, this parameter is populated with the following path when you install Webtrends: Webtrends Installation Directory\modules\expressanalysis\src.

To specify the source and destination information for standard SDC log files:

1. In the [wtmover2] section, locate the following lines of code:

# Move Standard Analysis logs from:
# sourcepath=\\sourcemachine\sourcepath\
# sourcepath1=ftp://sourcemachine2\sourcepath\
# sourceusername1=sourceuser
# sourcepassword1=sourcepass
sourcepath=D:\Program Files\Webtrends\modules\sdc\weblog

# Move Standard Analysis logs to:
# destinationpath=\\destmachine\destpath\
# destinationpath1=\\destmachine2\destpath\
destinationpath=D:\Program Files\Webtrends\storage\weblog

2. Uncomment the lines you want to use for configuration by removing the #.

3. If necessary, replace the uncommented SourcePath value with the path to the standard analysis log file as specified in the logrotation section of dcs.cfg. By default, this parameter is populated with the following path when you install Webtrends:
   Webtrends Installation Directory\modules\sdc\weblog. If you installed SDC in a different location or on another computer, you need to modify the path.

4. If your data resides in more than one location, add additional lines with information for SourcePath1, SourcePath2, and so on.

5. If you specified an FTP server for a SourcePath parameter, replace sourceuser and sourcepass with the login information for an account that has rights to the FTP server. Make sure you number the sourceusername and sourcepassword parameters to match the SourcePath parameter associated with the login. For example, SourcePath1 should use sourceusername1 and sourcepassword1.

6. If necessary, replace the uncommented DestinationPath variable with the path to the location on the computer where you want to make new standard analysis log file data available. By default, this parameter is populated with the following path when you install Webtrends: Webtrends Installation Directory\storage\weblog.

   Note

   If you specify UNC paths for the source and destination, you should configure the Webtrends - Mover service to act as a user with rights to the UNC paths you specified. To specify a user with the appropriate rights, edit the Webtrends - Mover service in the Windows Services panel, click the Log On tab, and enter the user credentials.

Activating the Webtrends Mover

To use the Webtrends Mover, you need to activate it as a service. Configure it to meet the requirements of your installation before you activate it.

To activate the Mover:

1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the Webtrends Installation Directory\modules\mover directory.
2. Enter wtmover -install startup=auto.
3. Enter wtmover -start.

Enabling Express Analysis on a Profile

To create an Express Analysis profile, enable Express Analysis in your profile settings. You also need to select settings that are compatible with Express Analysis.

To enable Express Analysis in an existing profile:

1. Edit a Full-Featured Analysis profile that uses the SDC data source you defined when setting up Express Analysis.

2. In the General dialog, select the Turn on Express Analysis for this profile text box.

To enable Express Analysis for a new profile:

1. In the left pane, click Administration > Web Analysis > Reports & Profiles.

2. Click New.

3. In the first dialog of the New Profile Wizard, select Advanced profile options.

4. Under Webtrends Analytics, select Standard (Full-featured Analysis) or Parent-Child with the Full-Featured Analysis. Express Analysis does not support Basic Analysis.

5. Click Next to continue configuring the profile.

6. In the General dialog, select the Turn on Express Analysis for this profile text box.

7. Complete the rest of the profile configuration dialogs. Webtrends Administration specifies features that are not Express Analysis-compliant. Keep in mind the following guidelines as you configure the profile and add Custom Reports, filters, and other settings:

   • Use caution when using regular expressions in your profile settings or in any associated filters or custom reports. Express Analysis does not support regular expressions, however, they will be used by the Standard Analysis.
   • When you associate objects such as filters with your profile, all the components marked will be used by Express Analysis, otherwise the features will only be available to, or used by, the Standard Analysis.