Urchin 4 represents more than 6 years of development, and is in our view the most advanced web analytics package available today. Combining proven datacenter-class performance with unprecedented ease-of-use, Urchin 4 is the best choice for businesses and hosting providers of all sizes.
What is Urchin?
Urchin is a web analytics system designed to enable businesses to easily analyze the traffic to their website(s) and create detailed, insightful, and intuitive reports. Basically, Urchin is a log-analysis program, but its sophisticated unique visitor reporting goes far beyond what was available up until now.
How Does Urchin Work?
Urchin consists of 4 primary components:
- The Admin Server
- The Log-processing and DNS resolution engine
- The Visitor Interaction Data Architecture (VIDA) database
- The Scheduler
The log-processing and DNS resolution engine does the heavy lifting in the Urchin system, coverting large raw log files into meaningful data, translating IP addresses to domains, and entering that information into the VIDA database.
The VIDA system is our highly-specialized, optimized, proprietary database for quickly entering and extracting web analytics data. This analytics-specific database is a significant part of Urchin's speed advantage over the competition.
The Scheduler is a program that regularly checks the configuration database for scheduled tasks that need to be run, and at the designated time, executes Urchin to process the task