Track BANDWIDTH with WEBTRENDS

[polpol]

Hi to all,
I'm wondering if any of you may be able to assist me. We'd like to track our site's bandwidth (Kbytes transferred trend) using webtrends but don't know how to undertake it on the tool. Does this require any site parametrizing?. Any advice on this would be highly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance,

[cgrantski]

If you can collect it, you can track it. Collection is your challenge.

I don't think the javascript method of collection will get you the kb number no matter what you do. Besides, you really don't want to try to use javascript data collection for this information because javascript tags can be installed only on HTML pages - not on pdfs, css, js, jpg, gif, wav, swf, and other files. And those kinds of files are probably the heaviest consumers of your bandwidth.

But IIS log files *will* record kbytes sent and received automatically. Then any analytics program, including WebTrends or even Excel, can summarize that log file field for you.

Apache logs will collect the KB number also, but WebTrends will not recognize the kbyte field in Apache logs (mostly because Apache logs don't label their fields the way IIS does.

So, bottom line- get your log files. Have WebTrends do the analysis if you want, and if you have the WebTrends software of course. (If you use the ASP model, it won't work). And it wouldn't be very hard to write a simple script that will process the logs, adding up all the values in the kbyte field. You won't need to try to clump the hits into visits to get bandwidth usage, so that makes the processing super-simple.