We purchased Urchin's web stats package before Google bought them. We're still using that creaky old software, even though its ability to interpret user agent string is diminishing. I'm not in the webmaster crew for this university, I'm just a client. But I do track the MyWeb stats through Urchin.
I also track our MyFiles (NetStorage) stats. This became more interesting the other day when I noticed that just over 40% of the bandwidth used by the Fac/Staff NetStorage server was transferred to user agents that are obviously WebDav. This is of note because WebDav clients are not javascript enabled, and thus will not register to things like Google Analytics. If I had been relying on Google Analytics for stats for NetStorage, I'd have missed the largest single agent-string.
Even though Google bought Urchin, it makes sense that they dropped the logfile-parsing technology in favor of a javascript enabled one. Google is an advertising firm with added services to attract people to their advertising, and it's hard to embed advertising in a WebDav connection. It used to be the case that RSS feeds were similar, but that's now a solved problem (as anyone who has looked at slashdot's feed knows).
In my specific case I want to know what the top pages are, which files are getting a lot of attention, as well as the usual gamut of browser/OS statistics (student myweb has a higher percentage of Mac hits, for one). One of the things I regularly look for are .MP3 files on the Student MyWeb service getting a lot of attention. For a while there the prime user-agents hitting those files were flash-based media player/browsers embedded on web pages, just the sort of thing that only logfile-parsing would catch.
One thing that the NetStorage logs give me is a good idea as to how popular the service is. Since apache logs will show the username if the user is authenticated, I can count how many unique user ID's used the service over a specific period. That can tell me how strong uptake is. I may be wrong, but I believe Google Analytics wouldn't do that.
The Urchin we have is still providing the data I need, but it's still getting stale. It's OS detection is falling apart in this era of Vista and 64-bit anything. But, it's still way better than Analytics for what I need.
I also track our MyFiles (NetStorage) stats. This became more interesting the other day when I noticed that just over 40% of the bandwidth used by the Fac/Staff NetStorage server was transferred to user agents that are obviously WebDav. This is of note because WebDav clients are not javascript enabled, and thus will not register to things like Google Analytics. If I had been relying on Google Analytics for stats for NetStorage, I'd have missed the largest single agent-string.
Even though Google bought Urchin, it makes sense that they dropped the logfile-parsing technology in favor of a javascript enabled one. Google is an advertising firm with added services to attract people to their advertising, and it's hard to embed advertising in a WebDav connection. It used to be the case that RSS feeds were similar, but that's now a solved problem (as anyone who has looked at slashdot's feed knows).
In my specific case I want to know what the top pages are, which files are getting a lot of attention, as well as the usual gamut of browser/OS statistics (student myweb has a higher percentage of Mac hits, for one). One of the things I regularly look for are .MP3 files on the Student MyWeb service getting a lot of attention. For a while there the prime user-agents hitting those files were flash-based media player/browsers embedded on web pages, just the sort of thing that only logfile-parsing would catch.
One thing that the NetStorage logs give me is a good idea as to how popular the service is. Since apache logs will show the username if the user is authenticated, I can count how many unique user ID's used the service over a specific period. That can tell me how strong uptake is. I may be wrong, but I believe Google Analytics wouldn't do that.
The Urchin we have is still providing the data I need, but it's still getting stale. It's OS detection is falling apart in this era of Vista and 64-bit anything. But, it's still way better than Analytics for what I need.