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What is the 'Probe'?
Probe is website usage analysis tool. It 'probes' certain pages
for being viewed by a visitor, without needing access to log-files
from the web-server. It can display an analysis of its self-created
log-files. (See: Example
sites). The rules for analysis can be modified to your needs.
These rules define a time-periode and/or a group of pages.
What do I need to use 'Probe'?
You only need access to a web-server with a cgi-interface (cgi-bin)
and perl.
How does the 'Probe' work?
The 'Probe' is a small perl-script returning a one pixel transparent
gif when invoked. This way we can create the following tag :
<img src=”/cgi-bin/probe.pl”>
So each time the page is being viewed by a browser, probe.pl is
invoked. It would be silly if that would be the only thing it does.
So the 'Probe' also stores the connecting IP-address with a timestamp
and all its passed parameters into a log-file.
But off course we don't want the log-file to grow indefinetly, thus
the 'Probe' will rotate the log-file after a defined periode, and
will rotate a defined amount of log-files. This way the 'Probe'
doesn't waste more diskspace then needed.
Since we don't like peeking into log-files ourselves, the package
comes with probe-analyzer. This analyzer parses the log-files created
by the 'Probe' and presents this data as a web-page.
The analyzer matches each log-entry wich a rule from a defined ruleset,
when a match occures the counter for the rule is increased.
After parsing all the data from the log-files, it creates a web-page
using the data in the ruleset.
Do
you still have questions?
Please
send me
your question, and I will answer you as soon as possible.
The 'Probe' is licensed under
GNU General Public License.
Probe Copyright (c) 2000 Aschwin
van der Woude
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