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Readme for analog3.1

Time reports

This section is about commands which control the appearance of the time reports. There are eight such reports, which show the pattern of usage over time. Six of them show the usage at specific times, whilst the Hourly Summary and the Daily Summary show the total (not average) activity at particular times of day and week over the whole time period of the report.

Each time report can contain columns listing the requests, requests for pages, and bytes transferred at that time, using the following code letters.

R: Number of requests
r: Percentage of the requests
P: Number of page requests
p: Percentage of the page requests
B: Number of bytes transferred
b: Percentage of the bytes

Which columns appear in which reports is controlled by various COLS commands. For example, the command

HOURCOLS Pb

tells analog to include the number of page requests and percentage of the bytes, in that order, as the columns for the Hourly Summary. The other COLS commands are MONTHCOLS, WEEKCOLS, DAYCOLS (Daily Summary), FULLDAYCOLS (Daily Report), FULLHOURCOLS (Hourly Report), QUARTERCOLS and FIVECOLS. There is also a TIMECOLS command, which specifies that all the time reports are to have the specified columns.

Similarly, analog can plot the bar charts in the time reports according to the number of requests, number of page requests, or number of bytes. This is controlled by the GRAPH family of commands. So, for example,

FULLDAYGRAPH P

tells analog to plot the bar charts in the Daily Report by the number of page requests. This also controls how analog decides which is the busiest time period in the bottom line of the report. Using a lower case letter tells analog to plot the bar charts with ASCII characters instead of the normal red bars. (This produces shorter output, and it is how they appear anyway in ASCII output style, or when viewed with a non-graphical browser.) So, for example,

FULLDAYGRAPH b

would plot the Daily Report by bytes, without using the graphics. The other GRAPH commands are MONTHGRAPH, WEEKGRAPH, DAYGRAPH, HOURGRAPH, FULLHOURGRAPH, QUARTERGRAPH and FIVEGRAPH. There's also an ALLGRAPH command to set all of them simultaneously.

You can plot the graphs either forwards in time (starting from the earliest date) or backwards (starting from the latest date). Use commands like

MONTHBACK ON  # Monthly Report backwards
WEEKBACK OFF  # Weekly Report forwards

The other BACK commands are FULLDAYBACK, FULLHOURBACK, QUARTERBACK and FIVEBACK. It tends to be confusing to mix directions (and analog will warn you if you attempt it) so usually you want to use the ALLBACK command which will set all of them at once.

For the more detailed time reports, you usually only want to list the last few time periods. (Every five minutes for the last three years?? I think not.) So analog provides some ROWS commands to let you specify how many rows you want in the time reports. For example

QUARTERROWS 96  # only the last day's worth
MONTHROWS 0 # 0 means no restriction: show all time

The other ROWS commands are WEEKROWS, FULLDAYROWS, FULLHOURROWS and FIVEROWS. Even if a ROWS command is given, the line at the bottom of the report will still show the busiest time period ever, not just the busiest one in that many rows.

The character which is used for plotting the graphs in ASCII style or on a non-graphical browser is specified by means of the MARKCHAR command. For example,

MARKCHAR =

tells analog to use the equals sign.

There is a parameter called MINGRAPHWIDTH which sets the minimum nominal size of the graphs. For example, if you set

MINGRAPHWIDTH 10

then the graph will be allowed to be up to 10 characters wide, even if that would exceed the PAGEWIDTH.

There is one more command which affects the time reports. You can specify which day should be counted as the first day of the week. This affects the layout of the Daily Report, Daily Summary and Weekly Report. For example, our local student newspaper publishes a new edition on the web every Friday, so they like to specify WEEKBEGINSON FRIDAY for their reports.

In the next section, we'll look at commands relating to the non-time reports.

Stephen Turner
E-mail: sret1@cam.ac.uk

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