This section will run through the main components of the Dashboard view and try to explain what they represent and what (if anything) they can be used for.

Note: the servers work in UTC and currently we do not have localisation in place.  So be aware, if you are based outside of the UK, or inside the UK and daylight savings are in operation, the times shown may look a little ‘off’. Servers always record in UTC, what we need is the ability to select a timezone in the Plugin’s profile setup, we’re just not quite there yet.

Unique Visitors per Day

This chart shows a day by day representation of how many visitors there have been to the site, and how many requests were made against the server for that site per day. Obviously the number of visitors is a useful number, but the difference between the number if visitors and the number of hits tells you how many requests a browser is making on average to deliver one page. This should give you an indication of how efficient the site is and how fast it responds to users.

Requested Files

Shows which files are being requested and how often. Note that you can click on the table headings to sort by a column in either ascending or descending order. It’s always useful to know which pages are being viewed the most, but also if non-pages are being hit frequently (.css, .js, images etc) then performance can often be improved by handing these off to a CDN.

Not Found URLs

These are requests that were made for files that don’t exist. If the file should exist then this table is quite useful for identifying problems. If somebody is (potentially repeatedly) trying to access a file that should not exist (and doesn’t) this is often a sign that someone is looking for an exploit or a file that has been compromised on other systems.

Visitor Hostname and IPS

This table and chart represent the top users of your site in terms of hits and visitors. Again sorting the columns can provide interesting insights, whereas you might expect the number of visitors from a given location to be one or maybe two, a larger number can either indicate many people from one company, or someone coming back to the site repeatedly, but with a sufficient time period between sessions to make it look like a new visit each time. Very large numbers of hits can indicate potential abusers or web crawlers which are a little on the ‘heavy’ side. Note that the actual addresses are partially anonymised which allows for analysis by geographical region, but not by user.

Operating Systems

Just what it says on the tin, it’s often possible to glean which Operating System a user is running on from the requests made by the browser. This table is a summary of the information the system has been able to derive. Note the triangle next to each entry, if you click on this it will open up more detail which is typically a breakdown of the Operating System by version. Often an insight in the type of users using the site. Not that opening a triangle with re-focus the chart on the break-down information.

Browsers

As with Operating Systems, a breakdown of the different types of browser people are using. Again clicking the triangle will break each entry down by version. Useful from a development perspective as it gives you an idea about how important compatibility is with different type of browser, or indeed whether support for certain browsers is needed for the site.

Time Distribution

Hits and Visitors per hour throughout the day. Useful indicator as to when busy periods for the site are. Don’t be caught  out wondering why visitor numbers exceed hits, there are two Y-axis scales 😉

Referrer URLs

When you’re on a site and click on a link, the address that contained the link you clicked on ends up being sent to the link you click on. So when a server receives a request that was linked from another site, the server knows the address of the page that the request was linked from (!)

This is know as the referrer and is a useful indication of how people are reaching your site. A “-” indicates that someone either typed in a URL, pasted in a URL, or used a bookmark to reach you. (or it was a crawler that didn’t supply a referrer reference)

Anything else indicates the address of another site with a link to this site. A referrer of www.google.com for example would indicate the number of times someone reached your site by clicking on a google search result.

Referring Sites

As with Referrer URL’s, but this lists the referrers grouped by site, rather than URL. So Referrer URL’s will give you pages that link to your site, but referring sites lists all the sites that contain pages that link to your site. So you might find one site has a number of specific links to your site, which would result in one entry in Referring Sites and multiple entries in Referring URL’s.

HTTP Status Codes

Very useful for spotting potential problems. You can lookup “HTTP codes” on Google for more detail on codes, but in summary;

• 2xx – Good, request was serviced as expected
• 3xx – Ok, request was redirected which is probably Ok
• 4xx – Page not delivered, either a non-existant page was requested, or a page is missing (or a link is ‘broken’)
• 5xx – The server is unhappy, visitors are potentially not getting pages they should

GEO Location

Gives an idea of which parts of the World your site visitors are coming from. Can be useful in many ways, if you see lots of traffic from a far-off location (for example) for something that’s very “local”, it might be an indication of someone looking for exploits or potentially abusing the site in other ways.