Web Analytics India

- Contributed by Mukesh Sharma

Numbers numbers numbers… where are the metrics??? Where are the reports??? Can i have the reports by noon? …demanded one of the managers.

It was a tense morning, not the first time though! It got even worse when we wanted to “export reports” from our trusted WebTrends. Now, so what if the report extractor is not working and throws up an error which analysts like us don’t understand?

Here’s a snap shot of the error.

Looking at the error file one can only say what the heck! How do I go ahead with this now?

Looks pretty messed up!! Isn’t it? Maybe there is a quick solution, but my focus was more on how to get the reports requested for and how to get back to the manager that his report might possibly get delayed. I terribly needed an alternative. Was there any? Well there’s always an alternative! And here the alternative was using the “Scheduled Jobs” feature in WebTrends. I had never used the scheduled job for extracting the reports before, but this turned out to be a perfect opportunity to learn and implement the feature. This feature does pretty much the same thing as the report extractor does, but the only difference being, one needs to schedule a report just like scheduling a profile. Now if you are thinking about the time, believe me it’s much better to use this feature instead of collecting the numbers manually.

Coming back to the reports which were to be delivered, the manager was pretty pleased to see the reports by noon!

Hey wait a minute, what about the “report extractor “? Well, that problem went on till a week or two, making calls to the WebTrends vendor, uninstalling and reinstalling the java plug-in several times. Add to this, a funny part in this tense situation - the vendor goes missing all of a sudden!

Finally the vendor returns. Ahh! Thank heavens. A call is set up with the WebTrends support team along with one of the much used remote support tool. But this wasn’t going to be a smooth ride. The next few hours saw me going through three different support guys with them again asking me to uninstall and reinstall the java plug-in, that in spite of me telling them that I already tried installing java plug-in afresh.

The problem wasn’t getting anywhere to a closure until I was put across the third guy. This guy too asked me to uninstall and reinstall java. Oh damn! This is too frustrating, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t really help. The call and the remote session went on for about an hour when suddenly the guy, asked me to open up IIS on the server where WebTrends was hosted and check the path where the exporter was installed.

Bingo! There was the problem. The home directory setting of the IIS setting had got changed - the setting for “The content for this resource should come from” had somehow changed to “A share located on another computer” instead of “A directory located on this computer”. Some magic!

Finally I checked if the exporter worked now. As a matter of fact it did and I thanked the guy for figuring out the problem. Was that the real problem? Should it have actually taken so many days to solve this problem? I thought, after the call ended that carried on for an hour and half on the final day, putting an end to over a week long problem.

Well I at least now know where to look for the problem if the exporter is throwing errors.