| User Documentation |
Access Panda v1.1 is a Perl 5 CGI script that generates fast, pretty graphs from the data in web site log files. It can graph usage by hour, day, week, or month, and displays top pages, machines, and top-level domains.
Access Panda needs Perl 5. It needs to run as a CGI script on a web site, and it needs to have permission to read your web log. Access Panda also needs CGI.pm, a free Perl 5 library for CGI scripts.
Unless told to do otherwise, Access Panda will read yesterday's web log and show you the total number of hits, the number of machines that read your pages, the ten most-read pages on your site, the ten machines that hit your site the most, the ten top-level domains (e.g. .com, .edu, .jp) that hit your site most often, and a graph of hits by hour of the day.
You can configure Access Panda to graph any day or days, week, month, or year, and you can change the "top ten" of anything to "top twenty", "top hundred", and so on, up to "top infinity" if you like.
Access Panda can also show you when pages have failed. By watching this log of failures, you can isolate broken links and other web site problems before they become serious.
When you visit your Access Panda, you should see an OPTIONS button at the bottom of the page. Click it to enter the Options Menu.
Checkboxes can be clicked on or off. When one is on, a small "X" will appear inside. You can change the contents of a text box by clicking it and then typing. Once you are done, click the "GO!" button to start Access Panda. If you'd like to save this set of options, bookmark the page that appears (the options are encoded inside the page's URL).
| Log File | This is the name of the file that holds your web log. It is not a URL. If you do not know where this file is, please ask your system administrator. |
| Date/Range Of Dates | If this is blank, Access Panda reads yesterday's web log. If you would rather see a different part of your log, write some other date (or dates). Here is a list of dates and date formats that you can write in this field:
|
| Show top <n> pages | If this is blank, Access Panda shows the top ten most read pages. You can change this to 20, or 100, or anything else. If you set this field to -1, all pages will be shown. |
| Show top <n> machines | This value control the number of pages that are displayed in the Hits By Machine and Errors by Machine reports. A positive value will show that number of pages and -1 will show all pages. |
| Show top <n> top-level domains | This value controls the number of pages that are displayed in the Hits By Top-Level Domain and Errors by Top-Level Domain reports. A positive value will show that number of pages and -1 will show all pages. |
| Don't show hits | Turning this option on will cause Access Panda to not display information about successful hits on the domain. This is useful when used in conjunction with Show errors. |
| Show errors | Turning this option on will cause Access Panda to display information about unsuccessful queries on your domain. |
| Don't show hits by page | Turning this option on will suppress the Hits By Page or Errors By Page reports. |
| Don't show hits by machine | Turning this option on will suppress the Hits By Machine or Errors By Machine reports. |
| Don't show hits by top-level domain | Turning this option on will suppress the Hits By Top-Level Domain or Errors By Top-Level Domain reports. |
| Don't show hits by hour of day | Turning this option on will suppress the Hits By Hour of Day graph. |
| Don't show hits by day of week | Turning this option on will suppress the Hits By Day of Week graph. *NOTE* The Hits By Day of Week graph will only be displayed if the date range is greater than one day. |
| Don't show hits by day of month | Turning this option on will suppress the Hits By Day of Month graph. *NOTE* The Hits By Day of Month graph will only be displayed if the date range is greater than one day. |
| Don't show hits by month | Turning this option on will suppress the Hits By Day of Month graph. *NOTE* The Hits By Day of Month graph will only be displayed if the date range span more than one month. |
| Do name lookups on Internet addresses | Turning this option on will cause Access Panda to attempt reverse hostname lookup on addresses in the access logs. If you see only numeric addresses (such as 123.123.123.123) and wish to see names for the machines, this option should be selected. Warning, this option is VERY slow and may not work on high traffic sites. |
| Don't display pretty top-level domain names | By default, Access Panda turns the raw top-level domains into meaningful descriptions. (For example, Access Panda would display Japan for the top-level domain .jp.) This option will turn off this behavior. |
All of the options that are on the options menu can be given to Access Panda on the URL. The names of the options and values are as follows:
| Log File | accessfile=<filename> |
| Date/Range of Dates | target=<date range> |
| Show top <n> pages | mabp=<n> |
| Show top <n> machines | mabm=<n> |
| Show top <n> top-level domains | mabtl=<n> |
| Don't show hits | sh=CHECKED |
| Show errors | se=CHECKED |
| Don't show top pages | stp=CHECKED |
| Don't show top machines | stm=CHECKED |
| Don't show top top-level domains | stt=CHECKED |
| Don't show hits by hour of day | shd=CHECKED |
| Don't show hits by day of week | shw=CHECKED |
| Don't show hits by day of month | shdm=CHECKED |
| Don't show hits by month | shm=CHECKED |
| Do name lookups on Internet addresses | nl=CHECKED |
| Don't display pretty top-level domain names | tl=CHECKED |
In addition, there are two parameters which can only be set on the URL. These are urlexcept and urlallow.
At this time, Access Panda has no way to permanently save the options from the options menu except through the use of bookmarks on the browser. However, if you have access to edit the Access Panda script, the default values for the number of pages, machines and top-level domains to show, urlexcept, urlallow, the default date range and the directory to search for log files are stored at the beginning of the script with comments.
Problem: When I run Access Panda, it gives me a server error, and the error log says Can't load
CGI.pm
Answer: The machine running Access Panda needs CGI.pm installed in the Perl library directory or
the same directory as Access Panda. If this is not the case, CGI.pm can be downloaded in .tar.gz
form from http://www-genome.wi.mit.edu/ftp/pub/software/WWW/CGI.pm.tar.gz.
Problem: When I run Access Panda, it gives me a server error, and the error log says Can't load
xxxxx.pm (strict.pm, Exporter.pm or integer.pm).
Answer: This probably indicates a problem in your Perl distribution or configuration. Exporter.pm,
strict.pm and integer.pm should all be include in your Perl library directory. You should check or
have your web server's administrator check the Perl 5 distribution on the machine to make sure it
was installed correctly.
Problem: My web server does not have Perl 5 installed.
Answer: If you are not your web server administrator, ask him or her to please install Perl 5. If you
are, then you should probably get the latest Perl distribution from one of the ftp sites mentioned on
http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html.
Problem: When I run Access Panda, I get back 0 machines hit a total of 0 pages.
Answer: First, check to see that you are asking for a valid time period and that your logs contain
information about that time, some services may trim your logs or restart them every month. Second,
make sure that Access Panda knows where your log file is and that it has permission to read the file.
If these are correct, you may have hit an incompatibility with Access Panda. In this case, send us
your log file (or a piece of it if it is very large) and we will attempt to help you.
Question: How do I get in contact with Big Panda House with questions or comments about
Access Panda?
Answer: Send email to comments@bigpanda.com.
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