Knowledgebase

AWStats is a free powerful and feature-packed tool that generates advanced web, streaming, FTP, or mail server statistics, graphically.

Installing AWStats

For installation instructions, please click here.

Using AWStats

Below you will find a glossary of common terms found in AWStats. If you have additional questions about AWStats and its use, we would recommend you refer to help resources at http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/index.html.

Unique Visitor:

A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your website during the current period shown by the report. If this host makes several visits during this period, it is counted only once. The period shown by AWStats reports is by default the current month. However, if you use AWStats as a CGI you can click on the "year" link to have a report for the year. In a such report, the period is a full year, so Unique Visitors are several hosts that have made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your website during that year.

Visits:

Number of visits made by all visitors. Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the "pages" are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor (assuming that some of the unique IPs are logged with more than an hour between requests)

Pages:

The number of "pages" logged. Only files that don't match an entry in the NotPageList config parameter (and match an entry of the OnlyFiles config parameter if used) are counted as "Pages". Usually, pages are reserved for HTML files or CGI files, not images nor other files requested as a result of loading a "Page" (like js,css... files).

Hits:

Any files requested from the server (including files that are "Pages") except those that match the SkipFiles config parameter.

Bandwidth:

Total number of bytes for pages, images, and files downloaded by web browsing.

Because of two previous notes, this number is often lower than the bandwidth reported by your provider (your provider counts in most cases bandwidth at a lower level and includes all IP and UDP traffic).

Entry Page:

The first page is viewed by a visitor during its visit.

NOTE:

When a visit starts at the end of the month to ends at the beginning of the next month, you might have an Entry page for the monthly report and no Exit pages. That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages.

Exit Page:

The last page viewed by a visitor during its visit.

When a visit starts at the end of the month to ends at the beginning of the next month, you might have an Entry page for the monthly report and no Exit pages. That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages.

Session Duration:

• • The visit was not finished when the 'update' occurred.
  • Visit started the last hour (after 23:00) of the last day of a month (A technical reason prevents AWStats from calculating the duration of such sessions).
The time a visitor spends on your site for each visit. Some Visits durations are 'unknown' because they can't always be calculated. This is the major reason for this:

Grabber:

A browser that is used primarily for copying locally an entire site. These include for example "teleport", "webcapture", "webcopier"...

Direct access / Bookmark:

• • By typing your URL on the web browser address bar
  • By clicking on your URL stored by a visitor inside its favorites
  • By clicking on your URL found everywhere but not other internet web pages (a link in a document, an application, etc...)
  • Clicking a URL of your site inside a mail is often counted here.
This number represents the number of hits or the ratio of hits when a visit to your site comes from direct access. This means the first page of your website was called:

Add To Favorites:

•  
  • x = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/anydir/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, and with no 404 error code
  • y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, with or without 404 error code
  • r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all browsers (r <= 1)
This value, available in the "miscellaneous chart", reports an estimated indicator that can be used to have an idea of the number of times a visitor has added your web website to its favorite bookmarks. The technical rules for that is the following formula:

Number of Add to Favourites = round((x+y) / r)

where As you can see in the formula, only IE is used to count reliable "add", the "Add to favorites" for other browsers are estimated using the ratio of other browsers usage compared to a ratio of IE usage. The reason is that only IE does a hit on favicon.ico nearly ONLY when a user adds the page to its favorites. The other browsers make often hits on this file also for other reasons so we can't count one "hit" as one "add" since it might be a hit for another reason. AWStats differentiate also hits with error and not to avoid counting multiple hits made recursively in the upper path when the favicon.ico file is not found in the deeper directory of the path. Note that this number is just an indicator that is in most cases higher than the true value. The reason is that even IE browsers sometimes make hits on the favicon without an "Add to favorites" action by a user.

HTTP Status Codes:

HTTP status codes are returned by web servers to indicate the status of a request. Codes 200 and 304 are used to tell the browser the page can be viewed. All other codes generate hits and traffic 'not seen' by the visitor. For example, a return code 301 or 302 will tell the browser to ask another page. The browser will do another hit and should finally receive the page with a return code 200 and 304. All codes that are 'unseen' traffic are isolated by AWStats in the HTTP Status report chart, enabled by the directives ShowHTTPErrorsStats. in the config file. You can also change the value for 'not error' hits (set by default to 200 and 304 with the ValidHTTPcodes directive. The following table outlines all status codes defined for the HTTP/1.1 draft specification outlined in IETF RFC 2068. They are 3-digit codes where the first digit of this code identifies the class of the status code and the remaining 2 digits correspond to the specific condition within the response class. They are classified into 5 categories:

• 1xx - informational
• 2xx - successful
• 3xx - redirection
• 4xx - client error 
• 5xx - server error 

SMTP Status Codes:

• • • 2xx/3xx - successful
    • 4xx - failure, asking the sender to try later
    • 5xx - permanent failure

SMTP status codes are returned by mail servers to indicate the status of a sending/receiving mail. The status code depends on the mail server and preprocessor used to analyze the log file. All codes that are failure codes are isolated by AWStats in the SMTP Status report chart, enabled by the directives ShowSMTPErrorsStats

in AWStats config file. You can decide which codes are successful mail transfers that should not appear in this chart with the

ValidSMTPCodes

directive. Here are values reported for most mail servers (These should also be values when the mail log file is preprocessing with maillogconvert. pl). SMTP Errors are classified into 3 categories:

2xx/3xx class - Success
They are SMTP protocols that successfully answer

4xx class - Temporary Errors
Those codes are temporary error message. messages They are used to tell the client sender that an error occurred but he can try to solve it but try again, so in most cases, clients that receive such codes will keep the mail in their queue and will try again later.

5xx class - Permanent Errors
These are permanent error codes. Mail transfer is a failure. No other try will be done.