[thelist] More interesting news / NetIQ buys WebTrends for $1 Billion

Chris George chrisg at gsnet.com
Wed Jan 17 13:57:31 CST 2001


We're running WebTrends 6 on a Celery with 128mb ram... our log files are
1.5 gig uncompressed.  We can run a report in 4 hrs.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that we were pleased by these results. We
had WebTrends 4.x for 2 years and for the past year it would take 12+ hours
to generate a log report (set it up on Friday, let it go over the weekend,
pray it doesn't crash and then come into a report Monday morning).

Man, did that suck.  So, I have to say, 6.x is an improvement.

We don't use it to generate stats for our clients to see though.  160+
client reports would kill us. Instead we use Webalyzer.  It's nearly as fast
as Analog and is a bit nicer/more configurable.

A couple of Things I Hate About Webtrends:

-- "Style" editor is _lame_ . If you want to get any sort of _real_ custom
style out of it, you've got to hack it in.

-- Errors with the logs:  It takes so frikkin' long to parse the logs when
it crashes at the end without any real attempt to fix it you feel like
lynching the software developers.

-- "Subscriptions" for bug fixes. I swear, the last 2 years of WebTrends
versions have been one bug fix after another.  That's why we didn't buy a
subscription in the first place.  I tend to disagree with the 'subscription'
mentality, as it tends to breed this exact scenario (of why should they put
out a good program the first time).

Anyway, I'm also coming into this thread mid-stream, so I apologize if this
is off on a bit of a tangent.  Log analysis is an important issue that needs
to be addressed.  

on 17/1/01 11:15, Daniel J. Cody at djc at starkmedia.com wrote:

> 
> 
> Michael Buffington wrote:
> 
>> Price.com uses Webtrends Enterprise to parse our daily log files
>> (200-400MB/day/site).  It takes about 12 hours total to download, parse, and
>> generate the reports.  We have a box dedicated to just Webtrends reporting,
>> with something like 512MB of ram and some heavy duty CPU's (dual)
> 
> exactly the same setup here, and the same results. The funny thing is,
> analog can go through about 1Gb of log files in about 30 seconds..
> 
> 
>> I'd love to see a good alternative to Webtrends that can do it quickly and
>> easily.
> 
> +1
> 
>> Also, for those with large log files, how are you managing those in the long
>> term?
>> 
>> We're archiving ours on tape backups, but we're curious about what other's
>> are doing.
> 
> Yup, we thrown them to tape monthly..
> 
> .djc.





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