Log Files

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NetTracker gets information about your Web site from your Web server’s log file. When visitors come to your Web site, they actually connect to your Web server, which serves the files the visitors’ Web browsers request (HTML files, image files, etc.). The Web server creates a log of each file visitors request, when it was requested, etc. This log is in the form of a text file:

This is just a portion of the first few lines of a 250,000-line log file (the file scrolls to the left for several more pages). This is a 10 megabyte log file, and it represents one day’s worth of traffic on a low-volume Web site.

In raw form, log files are essentially useless, because they are generally very large, containing detailed entries for each file that was served. When you consider that a single Web page can contain many image files and text files, you can easily see why log files can grow so large.

NetTracker takes this raw log file data and converts it into meaningful information about your Web site traffic.