How does Urchin 6 differ from Urchin 5?
This article describes the changes between Urchin 5 and Urchin 6.
Major Features
- Unlimited profiles, log sources and campaign tracking all included with base license; no add-on modules
- Comprehensive SEO/SEM campaign tracking features, 4 goals per profile
- Rich cross-segmenting available from most reports
- Full suite of visitor geo-location reports (not just visitor domain)
- Processing speed on par with Urchin 5 but with much richer data
Platform Support
- Broad range of Linux platforms supported with only 2 builds (Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels)
- Added support for FreeBSD 5 and FreeBSD 6
- Dropped support for MacOS X and Solaris
Installers
- Windows installer is now distributed as an MSI package, better unattended install support, integration with SMS
Configuration
- Relational database (MySQL or PostgreSQL) backend
- Support for configuration database hosted on remote configuration server
Web Server
- Upgraded to latest Apache 1.3.X release
- OpenSSL and mod-ssl upgraded to latest versions
- Removed default modules not used by Urchin
- Added mod_expires for proper cache control headers
Task Scheduler
- Scheduler now runs as two processes - master scheduler and slave scheduler
- Tasks easily managed via scripting interface to back end configuration DB
Visitor Tracking
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The Urchin 5 __utm.js tracking javascript has been replaced with a Google Analytics-compatible urchin.js tracking javascript. If you are tracking your site using __utm.js, you will need to change your site tags to use urchin.js.
Log Processing
- geodata stored in memory (larger runtime memory footprint)
- Range of Days feature in log sources allows multi-day search for log files matching a particular date pattern
- Ability to run profiles entirely in memory
Data & Storage
- Profile databases now default to 100,000 records/month (instead of 10,000) with option to increase up to 500,000 records per month
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Expanded Geodata: full set of geolocation data from Quova, replaces domain-only MaxMind data
- Monthly table record limit increased from default of 10,000 to 100,000 records
- 50 monthly files per profile, now organized by subdirectory
Reporting UI
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Flash replaces Adobe SVG for rendering graphs & charts
- Report exporting only in CSV and XML (removed unreliable MS Word/Excel exporting)
- All Profiles report is defunct
Ecommerce
- Ecommerce transactions can be written directly to webserver logs via special functions in the tracking javascript (identical to GA)
- External shopping cart logs in ELF2 format also supported
Security
- Thorough testing for cross-site scripting (XSS) and XSRF vulnerabilities