[LINK] Red Sheriff and Vic Gov [was MMV - Equivalent in other states?]

[M.da Cruz]

Sounds like overengineering to me.

I read the list and wondered why you need anything other than
an analysis of the logs - the standard logs from my Melbourne based ISP 
have provided this information , since 1997.The logs can be customised 
to aggregate and report the data in various ways. It is an Apache/Unix 
server.

 From the log for April 2004,

The most popular page on my website is www.ramin.com.au/online/newtheatre/

This is also the most popular entry point.

Visitors arived via
1     3121     46.68%     - (Direct Request)
2     490     7.33%     http://www.google.com.au/search
3     286     4.28%     http://www.google.com/search

Search Strings
1. new theatre newtown
2. new theatre
3  small trees
4  ramin

[I will now take the liberty of suggesting to Sydney siders that they 
should get along to the current vibrant production of Richard III :-)]

Ofcourse - I use straight HTML, no database, plenty of text and 
Metadata. I also sent out an alert to the opening of new productions 
with a URL to the exact page with the pertinent information.

Jeff, if you request this report about your websites, you may be 
surprised by the results.

Marghanita
jeff.evans at iird.vic.gov.au wrote:
> Richard
> 
> You wrote:
>    If there's an issue with "consistently" then that's an IT problem...
>    i.e. sort out the servers so they log in a consistent manner.
> 
> "Consistency" is an issue for us, as Boston Consulting Group discovered in
> a consultancy for MMV last year, in Vic Gov there are some 200 (physical)
> web servers, over 500 domain names, 50+ ISPs... A priority of the Office of
> CIO is to bring in rationalised web hosting and development through a web
> management framework. Trying to get consistent _anything_ in the web space
> (and across government?) seems to be a problem historically...
> 
> My own experience show server logs can vary significantly from package to
> package, ie BigPond's Statistics Server is not consistent with WebTrends
> data, which is different from other log file data... at least if we use one
> external provider we can compare April's chalk with January's chalk.
> 
> Why does Red Sheriff get singled out in this way? I believe WebTrends Live
> and other site statistics software also use server-side data aggregation.
> I'm not sure, but I'd expect the majority of larger .AU webhosts/ISPs are
> also having traffic data aggregated by Hitwise et al; when does such data
> collection become invasive?
> <snip>

-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
Ramin Communications, Sydney
www.ramin.com.au
Email: marghanita at ramin.com.au
Telephone: 0414 869202
Post: PO Box 341 Annandale NSW 2038 Australia
---------------------------------------------
Governance of ICT - http://www.acs.org.au/governance
----------------------------------------------------