Overview
This article provides a brief overview of how to configure logging for webservers other than Apache and IIS to facilitate proper processing and reporting for Urchin. Urchin will process any webserver log as long as it can understand how the data is organized in each log file entry. The information in this article applies only to access logs. If you are interested in details of e-commerce logging, please see the E-commerce Module section of the Documentation Center.
Regardless of your webserver type or logging format there is a set of minimally required fields necessary for Urchin to produce reports. They are:
- date
- time
- hostname or ip address of requesting system
- request (i.e. what document did the requesting system ask from your webserver)
- status code generated by request (numeric)
- bytes (bytes transferred from server to client)
- referral
- user-agent
- cookies (if the Urchin Traffic Monitor is installed on your site)
Configuration
The specifics of how to make changes to logging characteristics for every webserver would be too cumbersome to list. In general the easiest approach is to configure your logging to conform to either Urchin's NCSA or W3C form, then choose the appropriate default format from the Log Format dropdown menu in the Log Source. If your webserver can support this approach then see the document Logging - Apache and IIS. The information there on how the necessary data fields are setup may be useful to you, even though the details on the methods for making the changes won't necessarily apply to your webserver.