PROFILES DETAILS & EXAMPLES
A Profile is a collection of options that amongst other things defines the source of the log data you want to analyze, the database that will be created with the processed log data in it and the report that shows you that data, in many different ways, through tables and graphs.
You will need at least one Profile and may want or need more.
Cases where you might want more Profiles include:
- You have a technical and a marketing department that want different
customized
reports off the same log data
- You have clients who need reports with only their data, where the data source contains all customers data combined
- You have multiple identical devices (cluster/load balanced) being analyzed and want to report on each one individually
Cases where you might need more Profiles include:
- You have multiple different devices that need analyzing, for example a Web Server, a Firewall and numerous Event Logs
- You need to report on date ranges and have reports for each range (e.g. 2004, 2005, or Q1 2005, Q2 2005 etc)
Example cases:
1. You have three Apache servers and have Access logs and Error logs produced that need analyzing.
A. This will require 2 Profiles, one for the Error logs and one for the Access logs. They are different format logs so will require a new profile for each. You could get Apache to log combined log data and then will be able to
analyze
in a single profile.
2. You have a Web Server, a Firewall and 4 different Event Logs (from different systems) that need analyzing.
A. This will require a minimum of 6 Profiles, one for each log format.
3. You have a web site with 29 distinct sections that you want analysis of, one report for each section.
A. This will require 29 profiles, one for each section of the site.
4. You're an ISP with 8000 hosted accounts and you want to provide stats for each one of you customers.
A. This will require 8000 profiles, one per account. Even if the logs are the same format, you will want to have secure password access for each account.
5. You're an organization with a web server or farm, and you want to provide web server reports for your executives (high-level overview), your marketing team (visitors, page views, advertising conversions, etc.), and your IT team (hits, response times, bandwidth, etc.).
A. This will require 3 profiles, one for each independently focused set of reports from the same dataset.
