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[TABLE]Lotus Domino can act as an HTTP Web server. As with all Web servers, Domino produces log files of user traffic. And like all Web log files, the results contained in the logs are nearly indecipherable to the human eye. This problem is even greater for Domino servers than for other Web servers, because many Domino URLs contain long hexadecimal strings rather than normal directory and file names. Therefore, it is almost a requirement to use an analysis tool to understand and interpret Domino Web logs.
At the request of one of my customers, I researched the availability of Web log analysis for Domino and found five primary options, although there are certainly other choices as well.
My recommendations:
If anyone is aware of other Domino Web log analyzers that also perform automatic translation of Domino hex URLs (to their readable equivalent) please let me know.
Chuck Connell is president of CHC-3 Consulting, which helps organizations with all aspects of Domino and Notes.
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You asked about products that translated view IDs into names -- sorry, I don't know. To be honest, I'm more interested in databases than individual views/pages etc. But a standard product that I think you might include in your list is available from Analog.cx -- it works well with Domino text Weblogs and apparently works in 32 languages on lots of OSes.
—Mark M.
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Thanks for writing. You are right. That is actually the Web reporter that my own ISP uses. I should not have overlooked it!
—Chuck Connell, tip author
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We use WebTrends Reporting Centre...a big leap from the basic log analyzer tool (in cost as well).
It has a feature called "URL Search and Replace" (which we actually haven't used yet), but it looks like you could configure it to
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recognize a pattern via a regular expression back to something simpler. Sounds like it could work for this issue.
From the help file...
—Michael C.
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Thanks for writing. Yes, the more expensive products from WebTrends do include this "URL alias" feature. The WFS product does, too, in its base version. The problem with this as a Domino solution, though, is that you have to manually set up the mapping between the complex hex URLs and their meaningful name. Every time you add a new document to a Domino database, you have to add its URL/name mapping to the alias list. That's why you want a Domino Web log analyzer to do this automatically.
—Chuck Connell, tip author
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Here is another product that we use to analyze the Domino Weblogs. I'm not to sure about translating hex-URLs to readable URLs, because we use an older version of the product. Here's a quote from their Web site:
—Richard C.
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I read your article on the above with interest. I did develop a free utility, Beaver, that converts Domlog documents into W3C-compatible data. I prefer to use Domlog, as it's easier to manage the data from within Domino than it is to manage all those text files on servers. For more information click here.
Anyway, inspired by your article, I'm now working on getting Beaver to translate those horrible URLs to something more meaningful. It's not always straightforward as the title of a document may be in a field called "subject" or some even less obvious field, but I'll see how far I can get.
There is also something related on OpenNTF.org, but last time I looked it wasn't up to much.
—David C.
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I use AWStats for analyzing my Domino Web traffic. It is an open-source project written in Perl that runs as a CGI executable. Since it is Perl, it will run on any platform that supports the Perl runtime, and it has configuration examples for the various Domino server versions.
The only thing that I haven't been able to get to work correctly is a plug-in that assigns geo-locations to IP addresses. Everything else works like a champ. You can learn more about AWStats at AWStats.org.
—Andy B.
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I enjoy reading your tips and newsletters and expert advice. I just had one quick note on Webalizer. There is a Windows port of the product available so you can run it without Linux, which may be prohibitive for some shops. It's on the downloads page as "Win32 - Intel" pointing here.
—Adrian C.
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Chuck, some time ago we tested WebTrends and as I recall there was a feature where the tool would open each link to lookup the <title> tag to put some meaningful information in the Web statistics. I find it the only practical solution to "rename" the Domino unique IDs, because you would never know in which field in the Notes document the page title is. But in the HTML output, you should expect the title tag to be something meaningful.
—Markus K
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I have used WebTrends for a while and I have been annoyed by the same thing -- the unreadable URLs in the reports. You can use the Title tag but it doesn't give you much flexibility. In WebTrends you can make scripts that are supposed to change the actual log-file data before analyzing it. If anyone has examples of scripts like this, I would be interested.
My idea is to export a comma-separated textfile with the [universalID],[Subject?], each night and the have the script do the conversion in the actual log file. This could work.
In WebTrends there is already the function to use an external file for translation, but this only works on parameters so you can only do translations if the URL has a "?" and a "= " after the parameter. It is a nice function but I can't understand why you can't choose an external file in the URL replacement section.
—Fredric B.
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