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F E A T U R E

Review: NetIQ Shows Analysis Smarts

January 21, 2002
By Michael J. DeMaria


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Sane Solutions NetTracker eBusiness Edition

NetTracker is a veritable font of information. For example, we could see how many people exited at the main page of dreamscape.com. We then could see each individual visitor's entry page, referrer, browser, platform and time of visit -- for every visitor. All 160,000 of them, if desired. So if you want a heck of a lot of detail, you have it, even though you'll have to sort through a lot of data. NetTracker has a standard collection of graphing capabilities, and you can print out graphs for the sales force easily. However, the charts aren't as great looking as those provided by the other vendors. We wouldn't say they're ugly, but the WebTrends reports would look better on overheads.

NetTracker
(screen view)

Click here to enlarge

One of the product's unique features is its ability to trace how someone got to a page. This isn't just standard entry-path analysis or most common path; none of the other products offers this capability. On the other hand, you can't see bandwidth used by directory; bandwidth utilization is displayed by day, week or month only. You can see the top directories by hits or visits. Since you can drill down a directory to see every single hit, you may want to write custom SQL queries to find the top bandwidth users.

This product isn't the speediest -- taking about 12 hours on the dreamscape.com site. But keep in mind that was for a whole month's worth of data; incremental daily imports wouldn't take as long -- assuming you don't have a few gigs of data a day. If you need to do some in-depth data mining or custom reports, this product will be helpful. All the information is stored in a SQL Server database.

NetTracker eBusiness Edition. Available: Now. Sane Solutions, (401) 295-4809, (800) 407-3570; fax (401) 295-4154. www.sane.com

Microsoft Commerce Server

Commerce Server is not only a traffic analyzer, but an entire suite of e-commerce programs. The decision to go with Commerce Server should not be made based on its traffic analyzer, because the analyzer was the weakest of all those tested. However, if you're already using Commerce Server, the analyzer should serve the purpose.

Campaign analysis, ad placement and shopping-cart analysis can be done only if you are already running Commerce Server with IIS. And, not surprisingly, this product will run on Windows platforms only. In fact, if you're trying to use this product with an Apache-driven Web site, you're going have some fun because the log files can be read only in W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) format. While Apache supports W3C, it's not the default format, so you'll need to convert the log files to W3C first. All the other products we tested support Apache extended-log files natively.

Commerce Server
SQL databases
(screen view)

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Commerce Server runs on a SQL Server database (Microsoft offers a Commerce Server bundle that includes SQL 2000), so you can do data mining. The initial setup process and importing of log files are a bit complex -- unless you really like SQL. For the rest of us, the interface is much more difficult than rivals'.

As for reports, the results generated are not very attractive -- you won't be outputting directly to a transparency printer. These graphs rely too much on matching the color of the graphed item with the legend. When you're dealing with many elements (such as a list of exit pages), this gets irritating and unclear. Speaking of unclear, all the information you need is presented; however, the layout makes it hard to interpret.

Microsoft Commerce Server 2000. Available: Now. Microsoft Corp., (425) 882-8080, (800) 426-9400. www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/

Michael J. DeMaria is an associate technology editor based at Network Computing's Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. Send your comments on this article to him at mdemaria@nwc.com.