Mailing List Archive

ravikumar@staff.ownmail.com wrote:
> Hey guys,
> You all are very-much aware that Analog is a web log
> analyzer.So I think it is of very interest that people from which
> region of world has accessed your site. GeoIP resolution has it's own
> significance if you are dealing with some professional stuff.
> I want to make clear that ,those who are interested in
> Browser-report or OS-report should not follow this patch.
> After thinking over every possible way I choose to
> replace OS-report and Browser-report with GeoIP-report. "Aengus"
> suggested to use DNS look-up for GeoIP resolution as alternate and
> easy way but, the problem with it is that it affects the following
> reports and you probably would have to sacrifice all of them.
If you only want the basic geographic mapping and do not require
hostname statistics, there is an easy solution for getting Analog to
report countries instead of hostnames: run a local nameserver that
queries Geo::IP instead of DNS. Sample code is available at
<URL:http://www.atmedia.net/KlausRusch/projects/geoipnamed.html>,
extending this to return country and other information in a hierarchical
format shouldn't be too hard.

--
Klaus Johannes Rusch
KlausRusch@atmedia.net
http://www.atmedia.net/KlausRusch/

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<ravikumar@staff.ownmail.com> said:
> Hey guys,
> You all are very-much aware that Analog is a web log
> analyzer.So I think it is of very interest that people from which
> region of world has accessed your site. GeoIP resolution has
> it's own significance if you are dealing with some professional
> stuff.
> I want to make clear that ,those who are interested in
> Browser-report or OS-report should not follow this patch.
> After thinking over every possible way I choose to
> replace OS-report and Browser-report with GeoIP-report.
> "Aengus" suggested to use DNS look-up for GeoIP resolution
> as alternate and easy way but, the problem with it is that it
> affects the following reports and you probably would have
> to sacrifice all of them.
>
> 1> Host Report ,Host Redirection Report, Host Failure Report :
> It will show garbage Country and City information lines from
> DNS look-up file.
> 2> Organisation Report : It will show garbage Cou! ntry and
> City information lines from DNS look-up file.
> 3> Domain Report : It will show garbage Country and City
> information lines from DNS look-up file.
> 4> Virtual Host Report,Virtual Host Redirection Report,Virtual
> Host Failure Report : It will show garbage Country and City
> information lines from DNS look-up file.

You have to sacrifice something to get the GeoIP information into your
Analog reports - you chose to sacrifice the Browser and OS information,
and the advantage of using a single version of Analog. Or you can add
GeoIP information to the Host address, and use the reports that are
associated with IP names and addressesto display the information. The
Domain and Organization Reports only show "garbage" if you consider the
GeoIP information to be "garbage" - and you would hardly bother doing this
if you considered the GeoIP data to be "garbage". If you have a lot of
international visitors, the Domain report is already a long list of
countries - that's the very reason why the Domain report is a natural
place for displaying this information - add SUBDOMAIN *.* and you can see
city and country information instead of just Country information.

The other advantage of this approach is that Analog is already designed to
cache this type of information in user defined locations (DNSFILE) so
switching back and forth between between the GeoIP and the "clean" reports
is easy. A GeoIP script that would go through a log file and create a
DNSFILE would provide a very simple way for users to look at the GeoIP
data, and decide whether it is of any real value (given the already
discussed weakness of the actual data).

As I said, there are cosmetic advantages to your approach - Domain and
Host reports are case insensitive, and places names with spaces probably
wouldn't work. But you had to modify the Analog source and recompile to
get this to work - similar modifications would fix the cosmetic issue for
the Domain approach.

This isn't a criticism of the work you've done, or the decisions that you
made. I was prompted to respond by Paul Wades concern that your approach
doesn't work well for most Windows users who don't have the tools or
skills needed to recompile Analog. In those circumstances, the reports
that are based on IP information are a more obvious choice for displaying
GeoIP information.

Aengus

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Hey Everyone,

Alternatively, if you have your own domain, search on it from here:

http://www.alexa.com/

Go overview > see traffic details and you have a breakdown of the most popular
countries from which your visitors come. Inaccurate city data is misleading
at best and most likely harmful from a marketing perspective, but I don’t
think that is Ravikumar’s fault…

It would be great if Analog had a feature like this anyhow, I’m sure we all
agree on that!

Paul


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