Operating W3Olista from the Query Form

Before you can enjoy browsing your statistics, you must enter search and display criteria into this form and submit it.

Entering Data into the Query Form

The query form features a rich choice of parameters for report generation.

Display limitations

The first four input fields limit the report to certain items:

Include hosts: Only requests from this host (any host if this field is empty) are used.
Exclude hosts: Requests from this host (no host if empty) are ignored.
Include files: Only requests of these files or directories (or any file if empty) are used.
Exclude files: Requests of these files or directories (or no file if empty) are ignored.

All values are used as substrings, thus an input value of com into one of the host fields would apply to both the top-level .com domain and any host name that accidentally has the string com somewhere in his name. To prevent this, you can always enter .com into the field. You can enter multiple items into each field by separating them with a semicolon. Multiple values in a field are combined by logical or, then the four inputs are combined by logical and.
Example: I enter rbi.informatik. (our local domain) into the Exclude hosts field and /~fp into the Include files field. This selects all accesses to my own pages which do not come from our local domain (usually, I'm the only one inside our domain reading my pages, and I don't want to show up in the report myself).

Date Selection

The next item to select is the time span which to report. You can choose among the following:

Today

From midnight to now.

Yesterday

Yesterday.

This Week

From sunday to today.

Last Week

The last week from sunday to saturday.

This Month

From the first of this month to today.

Last Month

The full last calendar month.

Last 24 Hours

From yesterday at this time to now.

Last 7 Days

From seven days ago to yesterday. Today is excluded.

Everything

Everything we have logfiles about.

These Dates

This selection enables the two following input fields, where you can now manually enter a time span to report. You can enter:

Absolute Dates: The following formats are accepted: MM/DD/YY; DD.MM.YY; MMM DD YY. The year can be given either as two-digit number or as four digits, and can even be completely omitted; in that case, the current year is assumed. In the last format, the Month must be input as the english three-character abbreviation.
Relative Dates: If you enter a negative integer number, this number of days is substracted from the current date. For example, you could enter '-7' into the first field and '-1' into the second. This input would equal the 'Last 7 Days' selection.

In all cases, the first date must be less than the second date. If you leave the second field empty, only the single day entered into the first field is reported.

Display Selection

These are three lines where you can select what shall be reported. The first line controls the host listing display, the second line the file/directory tree and the third line the date listing. For each of these, you can select if the full listing, only a summary, or nothing should be printed. If you select the full listing, you can also set the detail level. The detail level has the following meaning:

Host Listing: A detail level of 1 only lists top-level domains, like .edu. With Detail=2, you will also get the domains below the top level. Each higher level adds more detail. If you select 'All', everything down to the host is printed.
File Listing: A detail level of 1 only lists files and directories directly in the root directory. Each higher level adds one more level to the directory tree depth.
Date Listing: You can choose to report years, months, days or hours. The 'hour' setting is identical to the 'All' setting.

There is one more similar listing type, the Entry Listing. This one lists the individual entris from the logfile. This setting is exclusive, meaning that you can either print the Entry Listing or the other listings. If you select to print an entry listing, no other listing is printed.
You must at least set a single listing selection to something different from 'No', otherwise you won't get anything.

Sorting

The output can be sorted alphabetically (this means 'chronologically' for date listings), by the number of requests, or by the total number of kilobytes transferred (from a directory, to a host, or on a date, respectively).

Submitting

After filling in all the data and selecting all the items you want, you can submit the form by clicking the 'Run Report' button. After submitting, you should be patient, since creating a report takes its time, especially on a large amount of logs.

The Report

If everything went okay, and the program is set up correctly, you should get a browseable report, consisting of a number of sections. The first section tells you what this report is all about.

The search parameters

First to appear are the search parameters. You will see a lot of highlighted items there, these are all switches, with which you can switch items on or off, wherever appropriate.

The Listings

Every item in the listings is clickable and zooms into this particular item. The power of W3Olista is recursive. You can apply any kind of zooming to the result of a previous zoom-in. The only way to experience this power is by browsing through the results on your own.

The 'Add'-Form at the bottom

At the bottom of the report, you will find one more form in which you can enter more query parameters (new hosts to exclude, for example); and there's also a button to apply the current report on another date.

Final words

I'm sorry if the above text didn't explain everything, but a correct explanation of what happens when you click anywhere would require many more pages. I can only suggest to play around and click on anything to get to know what's possible. You will be surprised by the level of insight you can get into the operations of your server.

Frank Pilhofer <fp -AT- fpx.de> Back to the Homepage

Last modified: Wed Apr 12 11:17:07 1995