Bazaar Analyzer Pro | SYS-CON AUSTRALIA

Bazaar Analyzer Pro

Aug. 1, 1997 12:00 AM

In many companies, Web site statistics must be analyzed by many people throughout the organization. Your consulting division may want to know how often its page has been hit and by whom, while your software products division will want to know how often a particular page has been visited and how long each page was viewed (as well as who viewed it.). To generate this kind of information, it previously was necessary to ask the Webmaster to do so, which would normally entail either going to the server yourself (if you were the Webmaster) or requesting that they set aside some valuable time to generate the report. Many log analysis programs can be configured so that a specified report (such as most common domain name) can be e-mailed to a number of recipients. This is a nice feature, but if you're not the Webmaster and you want to request additional information, you'll have to annoy your poor, overworked Webmaster again. How can you give people throughout your organization access to the information they need (especially marketing people with little technical background) and give them the flexibility they want (while at the same time keeping them out of your hair)?

There really was no way to do so until Aquas came out with Bazaar Analyzer Pro 1.0. Bazaar Analyzer Pro is a log-analysis software package for Windows NT and many variants of UNIX which enables people throughout your organization to generate the reports they need when they need them. You gain access to Web Analyzer Pro through a Java-based client GUI interface. The idea of a Java client and platform-specific server software is, in my opinion, an excellent design decision by Aquas which allows users anywhere on the Net the ability to create Web site statistical reports when needed, no matter which platform they choose to access this information from (or over an Intranet or an Internet.) If your marketing department uses Macs, and the Web server is a UNIX variant, you would normally need your Webmaster to generate a report for your marketing staff. Now you can do it yourself.

A variety of reports that are of interest to just about every area of a company are preconfigured: a Bandwidth Report, Most/Least Requested Pages, the type of organization which generates the most traffic (.com, .edu, etc.). One thing that particularly impressed me was the extensive support Bazaar Analyzer Pro has for country domains (.us, .nz, etc) If your company has an international presence (which could be any company on the Web) you will find this feature useful. Applied Visions, Inc. products have sold well in overseas markets, mostly thanks to our on-line marketing efforts, and we want to do everything possible to ensure that the content of our site will attract many more international customers. This feature lets us cater to our international clientele because we know who they are.

Bazaar Analyzer Pro 1.0 consists of five major parts:
1. An Administration Tool
2. A Report Configuration Tool (which reports you wish to run)
3. A Report Generation Tool
4. An Options Menu which consists of three tools:

a report generation scheduler

an Alert function which lets you spy on a particular page and if a particular user has hit that page

the Bazaar Minder, which lets you monitor another URL if its contents have been changed
5. A Watch Tool generates real-time statistics over your Intranet/Internet as to your site's use. This would be helpful to let you monitor how effective a media announcement is in driving traffic to your site, for instance

The Report Generation Tool
The Administration Tool is simple for anyone familiar with creating user accounts on a network. You need to set a password and let Bazaar Analyzer Pro know where to find the log files. That's as far as it goes.

The Profiler (in the Customize menu) is the tool which lets you configure the type of report you wish to run and specifically how you wish to see your data represented. (Do you care that 1 percent of your traffic is from *.mil Web sites? Or, would you rather have it represented in the "Other" section?) You can configure it from this menu.

If you expect several people to need access to a given report, you may archive it and they may retrieve it at their convenience.

The Report Generation Tool generates reports in HTML, pops another browser and displays the information in Java applets. Each applet may be dynamically rerendered as a pie, bar or line graph, or as a table. The applet dynamically explains information when the mouse is moved over an area for clarification. Here are some of the reports that are generated:

The Options Menu
The Report Scheduler The first utility in the Options menu, the report scheduler lets you specify the type of report to generate, the frequency with which to generate it and the people to e-mail it to, if desired. I thought this feature to be good, but what is really the point of e-mailing an HTML-only non-interactive version of a report to someone when they can view the fully interactive Java-based version? This is a standard feature in most log analysis tools, which is probably why they included it, but this should have been an opportunity to provide better reports than other Web site analysis tools.

The Alert Feature If I'm trying to sell a client my latest product and I direct him to my Web site, how do I know if he ever came to visit? Your average executive normally would have to ask their Webmaster to search the Web server's log or the customer's URL in a generated report. Bazaar Analyzer Pro has an Alert feature which pops up in your window when a particular user visits a page. It can be configured for multiple users or without specifying a user. I thought this feature to be especially nice because it allows people who may not be familiar with Web servers and their tools to use the corporate server as a business tool.

The Minder The Minder monitors a URL at a remote location and e-mails you when something on that page has changed. This feature is far more efficient than an application like FrontPage, which pushes you to check all the links in your Web with a tool. A simple e-mail from Bazaar Analyzer Pro will enable you to maintain all external links on your Web site, as well as monitor certain URLs for product updates (including your competitors).

The Watch window allows for real time monitoring of the number of hits a page is getting. You may change the style of the graph, the page, the scale of the graph or the increments in which the information is generated.

Overall Analysis
What the Bazaar Analyzer Pro does, it does well. It will provide your organization with the data necessary to make informed decision about the organization and nature of your Web site. It also will enable your entire organization to use your Web site as a tool for business. I would say that this is a great example of the type of application which greatly benefits from Java - any user could use all the features of Bazaar Analyzer Pro - whether the user was on a UNIX or Windows machine. If this sort of flexibility is important to your organization, you may want to download the latest copy at http://www.aquas.com.

One caveat: I had numerous problems installing Web Analyzer Pro 1.0. Aquas was very patient with me, offering generous assistance. By the time you read this, Web Analyzer Pro 2.0 should be out. It should contain, among other things, historical tracking of Alerts, the ability to track the path of a user through your Web site and an option to interface your Web server to a pager. Hopefully, in the next release Aquas will have streamlined their installation and configuration process.

Web Analyzer Pro is competitively priced at $699 per license. If you're a Webmaster in an organization for which multiple people in different parts of that organization (or different organizations entirely) need access to information, and need it on demand, I urge you to try Web Analyzer Pro. It's a nice idea, nicely executed and cleverly and purposefully designed. And, it should keep your marketing department happy, which alone may be a good reason to try it.

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About Jon Steiner
Mark Larkin, Tim Vercruysse and Jon Steiner all work at Applied Visions with Java and VRML. Applied Visions was recently awarded an SBIR grant from the Air Force to implement Network Visualization Security strategies using VRML and Java. This article is based on Mark's and Tim's work.