To start with, there are plenty of aesthetic changes that have come about in version 4.52. While they may not blow you away at first, you'll enjoy them. Some of these include:
- The content editor is now organized into groups
- Warning messages appear when deleting information from certain databases
- Support for Word 2000
- Numeric alignment in the style editor when working with Word format reports
- Shaded headers and footers in reports
As with version 4.2, version 4.52 installs fairly quickly and effortlessly on any Windows 95/98/NT system, though it's recommended (by me anyhow) that you do not install it on the webserver. Due to speed and processing constraints, it's best to install it on a client workstation with network or ftp access to the webserver's logfiles. I'd hate to see the slowdown this could cause an already burdened webserver.
If you're read my previous review, you know I mentioned the overall sluggishness and instability of Log Analyzer. For this review, I got to speak to the product manager, who noted that I was using a "really underpowered workstation" to test the software against. At the time, I was running it on a Pentium II 300 with 64 MB of RAM to read and analyze 2 MB logfiles (or I would analyze a batch of files, comprising 50 MB of logs). These amounts of data were handled readily by HitList, and I assumed that since the minimum requirements for the Web Trends product were Windows 95/98/NT and 32 MB of RAM I'd be able to use it on my system. Not so according to Web Trends. It was recommended that I immediately upgrade my RAM to a minimum of 128MB, if not 256MB, and try to get at least a Pentium 400 or better. I shouldn't say that they told me it wouldn't work, they just said it would work "better" under a more powerful workstation.
For this review, I upgraded to 128 MB of RAM. Guess what? It did help, but I still encountered the random "Illegal Operation Error". Especially when trying to chew up more than 25 MB of logfiles, and when I went for the full load of 50MB of logfiles, it usually crashed two full times before I finally got the reports to run. While I understand logfile processing is pretty intensive, I don't think I should have to be running an "uber-workstation" to do it. When I ran stats with HitList and Funnel Web (mentioned below), never once did I get a blowout. Just to be safe, I defragged and scandisk'd my drives before running the reports. Maybe I'm just too picky.
Enough griping, on to the improvements. First off, there's the overall speed. Absolutely without question, they've sped up reporting and DNS lookup in this version of the product. I can't say enough about the speed increases. Now, I can actually have it do lookups on DNS so that my reports print "joesdomain.com" instead of "10.10.10.100", which makes for far more useful executive reports. Report generation in general has sped up by 30%, which is obviously helpful when you're trying to rush a report out the door (as I tend to do just before important meetings).
The reports are pretty much the same as they were in the past, all very friendly and easy to reconfigure. I'm still stumped as to why my machine throws and Illegal Operation Error every time I try to modify the Executive Summary, but a quick reinstall seemed to take care of that. Modifying reports is very easy now, with a list of checkboxes allowing you to quickly modify reports. Modifying the data contained within reports is likewise fairly simple and the filtering system allows you to create complete reports that won't leave people scratching their heads and saying "what's this page do?".
If you're looking to have reports run automatically, the Web Trends scheduler will fast become a good friend to you. As an example, to run a month's worth of logfiles on my workstation, it takes about 3-4 hours. Not something I want to do in the middle of a busy workday. So what's a guy to do about it? I run the scheduler at night when I'm out of the office, and in the morning I arrive to fresh happy reports on both of my webservers.
I will be perfectly honest and admit that I didn't get to test the new remote reporting server. The goal of this server is to allow users to connect from anywhere and run webserver reports on their clients. The idea is that you could have salespeople out selling ad impressions, and they could pull up reports of how successful other banner ads/click-through accounts have been. The main requirement is that the server must be run on a Windows NT machine, so if you're running Web Trends on a Win95/98 workstation, you won't be able to set up the remote-reporting server. Bummer. If you're running NT, as most of us are slowly migrating to, then you're all set, so I would certainly not hold this against the product in any way.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm not covering this upgrade as a comparison with HitList Pro, but I will say this much: this upgrade puts both products on equal footing and so you'll probably have to download and try both of them to see for yourself which you prefer more.
On to another product…
While I had intended to just cover the latest upgrade to Web Trends Log Analyzer, I can't help but mention Funnel Web from Active Concepts (www.Active Concepts.com). This "little" application provides incredibly fast and accurate webserver data analysis from logfiles.
While nowhere near as complete as Web Trends or HitList Pro, Funnel Web provides all the basic reports you might need to keep smaller scale websites on track. The basic product (I didn't receive the Pro version in time for this review) carries with it all the basic reporting tools a webmaster needs.
Some of the reports found in Funnel Web include:
- Search engine keywords used to find your site
- Referral sites
- Browser types
- Most commonly accessed pages
- Site errors
- Loyalty Ratings by user
- Time spent online
While this may sound like a more basic reporting suite than what you'd get with other toolkits, I've found it to be more than enough to help me decide what types of changes, corrections, and deletions I need to perform on our corporate Intra/Internet.
The processing speed of Funnel Web is nothing short of amazing. I have seen nothing that chews up and spits out logfiles as quickly as this product. Unlike other products requiring tons of RAM and CPU power, Funnel Web ripped through 50 MB of Logfiles in about 5 minutes, never once crashed, and never so much as hiccuped during a report.
The disadvantages of Funnel Web? The reports can't be modified in the basic version, and the only available outputs are HTML, RTF, and comma separated files. Also, the reports are not as in-depth as you'd get with Web Trends or most other products.
If you're looking for pure speed and a basic suite of reports without all the glitz of a high-end product, I'd highly recommend Funnel Web. Just recently my boss came in asking for a report on our webserver for the past 30 days "quickly". It was at this point that I realized I really liked how Funnel Web could chew up the logfiles in just a few minutes, while with Web Trends and HitList, I gave up and went to lunch while they were working.
