LogView
This is the administrator's part of the LogView manual. This part
contains information of how to install and configure LogView, but to
increase the understanding of these subjects, we start out with a
deeper survey over the LogView system.
Internal and external logs
LogView handles two types of logs; logs that LogView collects itself,
one for each virtual server it is installed to, and log files in
Common log format that are created in other ways and imported to
LogView. The first kind contains the most information and can
therefore be used to create more complex statistics. All logs that
LogView creates are compressed to save disk space.
Statistics groups
A statistics group consists of one or more logs as well as
a configuration of statistics functions. Statistics groups makes it
possible to view statistics from several log files, for example if the
web site is handled by several web servers. It is also possible to
configure exactly what statistics should be calculates, by choosing
which statistics functions to enable.
Databases
LogView keeps a database for each function enabled on each statistics
group. In these databases, LogView stores information that has been
extracted from the logs by the functions. For example, if the function
Most common browser is enabled on a group, a database is
created to store the number of hits per used browser type. Inside the
databases, the data is divided into different tables per a time unit,
most often per day or hour. In this way, when the user requests a
specific kind of statistics for a specific group and time interval,
LogView can easily get the information needed to calculate the
statistics from the database.
Updates
Once a day, once an hour, or when the administrator uses the
Update command, LogView performs an update operation. This has
effects on both logs and databases.
All imported external logs are checked, and the last hour's hits
are appended to a corresponding internal LogView log. The logs created
by LogView itself are not affected, since they are updated
automatically after every access to their virtual server.
The databases of the statistics groups are updated with the data
gathered during the last hour, making the new data visible in the
statistics.
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