Statisphere
Preview by Al Giovetti
Price: $399
Genre: Web site tool
Release: Fall 1996
Producer O’Reilly Associates
Phone:
web site: http://statisphere.ora.com.
Operating systems: Windows 95 or Windows NT
Requirements:

Summary: Software Delivers Graphical Profiles and Long-Term Trend Analysis, dynamic real-time web traffic analysis, graphs web traffic on Windows, Unix, and Mac Servers.

History: Founded in 1978, O'Reilly & Associates is recognized worldwide for its definitive books on the Internet and UNIX, and for its development of online content and software. O'Reilly developed the Global Network Navigator (GNN), a pioneering web-based publication which it sold to America Online in June, 1995. In addition to Statisphere, the company's other software products include award-winning servers WebSite Professional and WebSite 1.1, WebBoard, a web-based multi-threaded conferencing system, and PolyForm, a web forms construction kit. O'Reilly & Associates' affiliate companies include Songline Studios, an innovative content developer for online audiences, and Travelers Tales, an award-winning travel book publisher.

Statisphere is a product of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. and is created in cooperation with Dave Tubbs. Statisphere, WebSite, and WebSite Professional are trademarks of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All other names are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies. O’Reilly is a substantial company with a long line of great products.

Statisphere(TM), a new Web traffic analyzer, provides precise, graphical reporting on who is visiting Web sites and what they're reading, according to O'Reilly & Associates. The software is scheduled for a Fall 1996 release and has a list price of $399.

Running on Windows 95 or Windows NT, 32-bit Statisphere can analyze ASCII log files for Windows, UNIX and Macintosh Web servers such as O'Reilly's WebSite, Netscape FastTrack, Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), and Apache. The product supports Common (older NCSA/CERN), Combined (NCSA/CERN), and Windows log file formats.

Statisphere provides dynamic, real-time graphs that can be displayed on the Windows desktop. Since the graphs are updated every 60 seconds, they show the current system statistics at a given moment in time--users don't even need to generate a report. All other statistics programs generate only paper or HTML reports, and are unable to match Statisphere's updating.

Statisphere reports on how many users visit a site (on intranets or the Internet) during a given day, week, or month, which sections or pages are the most popular, what sites have referred visitors, and when peak traffic times occur. Previously, this information has often been difficult to obtain. "Because of its speed and ease of use, Statisphere finally makes it practical to take Web traffic analysis out of the webmasters' hands, and put it onto the desktops of marketing, sales and financial professionals," comments Martin Ogawa, product manager. Because it lets users track access logs on remote system drives, Statisphere is ideal for sites hosted by Internet Service Providers.

Statisphere is one of the only programs that can analyze log files on very large sites (more than one million hits a day) without requiring custom programming. Unlike some products that limit log files to 75 megabytes, Statisphere's limit is more than one gigabyte.

Statisphere's exceptional speed in delivering easy-to-read, HTML-compliant reports is based on a unique approach to reading the logs. After constructing the initial database for a particular profile, Statisphere simply updates an existing database with the new data extracted from the server's logs. Statisphere only needs to read the new information found in the logs, not the entire log. "We don't believe any other program is able to match Statisphere's speed," says Dave Tubbs, product developer. "Other programs need to read the entire log file each time a new report is requested, which takes much longer. Statisphere users can easily accomplish in a few minutes what can take many hours using other programs."

Statisphere also saves time by reading remote network-mounted files where they reside, thus eliminating any performance reduction on the local system. Other programs retrieve remote log files for analysis, which takes substantially longer and uses greater system resources.

Other outstanding features of the product include:
* more than 20 color-coded, Web-ready graphs including current and long-term Web usage, weekly and daily traffic, top 10 active sites, domain breakdown
* graphical wizards for easy install and profile creation
* ability to create an unlimited number of customized tracking profiles
* ability to monitor hundreds of items, such as HTML pages, images, cgi-bin events, or online transactions, with each tracking profile
* exclusion of any items or IP addresses, as the user chooses
* ability to scan logs of any size (even multi-gigabyte), and simultaneously read logs from up to 16 separate servers
* easy tracking of log files in a multi-homed (virtual server) environment
* built-in database storage of historical data for long-term trend analysis
* domain name lookup to resolve IP addresses and identify visitors' hostnames.

Statisphere includes a comprehensive book from O'Reilly (135 pages), online help, 30 days of free, basic technical support for registered users, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The product will be sold at software resellers worldwide. More information is available at http://statisphere.ora.com.