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.

- Contributed by Mukesh Sharma

Ever wondered how you could give access to a particular child profile to a user

In the newer version of Webtrends, v8.5, there are pre-defined roles like Administrator, Report Manager and Report User. There is also a provision to define your own role. Question is can you solve the problem of assigning child profile access using these added functionalities?

Here’s a scenario – you have one profile under which you have 10 different child profiles. You need to give access to one of the child profiles to one user without him/her being able to view other child profiles. How do you do it?

Heres the solution to the above problem without using the above said roles.

1. In the left pane of your Webtrends application, Under Administration > Application Settings > User Management. Click on Users
2. Click on New user
3. Under the General tab fill in all the required fields like the login name, First name, Last Name, Email
4. Under User Authentication select the second option (Use WebTrends authentication based on the password provided below) so that once you are finished you can login with the users’ credentials and check if you have given access to the correct child profiles
5. In Action Rights, give View permission for Custom Report and Templates
6. Give create permission for Export To Microsoft® Excel (MDB Database) and Export Word, CSV, PDF Reports
7. In Profile Rights, give View permission to the Main Profile under which you have different child profiles.
8. Let the Template Rights and Preferences have default values.
9. Now go back to Reports & Profiles under Administration. Expand the Main profile to which you have given View Permission.
10. Click on Edit Child profile, the child profile to which you want to give access to.
11. click on Profile Access tab.
12. Give View Reports permission to the user.
13. Logout from your webtrends id and login using the users credentials you just created and check if the correct child profile access has been given to the user.

On a concluding note, is this the best way to give access? Well researching on any new tool is definitely fun!