Frequently Asked QuestionsGetting Started:
Configuration:
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Interpreting Your Results:
Summary runs and then it just sits there - All interaction with Summary is through a web browser. The first thing you need to do is access Summary through your web browser. 1) Run the Summary application. On Windows select Summary from the start menu. On Macintosh double click the application icon. On Linux systems, switch to the Summary directory and give the command "./summary". On Macintosh when running Summary from the command line, switch to the Summary directory and give the command "./summary-cli". Summary will display a heading including a line like:
The URL inside the quotes, displayed by your copy of Summary, is the Web address you should use to access Summary. 2) Leaving Summary running, run your web browser and enter the Web address for your copy of Summary (from step 1) into the location or URL line of your web browser and press enter. This URL will contain the address of the computer you are running Summary on. Your browser should display a page with the Summary logo in the top left-hand corner named "Summary Main Page". Summary appears to be working but I don't get anything in my web browser. You can also try using the IP address of your machine as the URL for the web browser. On Macintosh you get that by opening the TCP/IP control panel and using the value it displays for "IP Address". Under Windows, run the program "winipcfg" and use the IP address it displays. If you are running your browser on the same machine as Summary you can also use the URL <http://127.0.0.1:9000/>. You can also try using any valid domain name or IP address for your machine with the correct port number. If your browser is configured to use a proxy server or firewall the proxy server or your network firewall may prevent access to the local machine running Summary. You can check for this by temporarily configuring your browser to not go through a proxy or firewall. If you can access your copy of Summary after doing that you should speak to your network administrator about the correct way to configure your network to access your copy of Summary. When I go to the URL Summary gives me, I see my web site, not Summary? When I go to my web site I see Summary and not my web site? - Both Summary and your web server might be trying to use port 80. Manually configure Summary to use something other than port 80 by setting "Port to serve on (0 - autoselect)" in the Details section of configuration. If you can't access Summary at all, it may be necessary to manually edit the configuration file. The configuration file is located in the "Config" folder/directory and is called "summary.conf". Quit Summary and then add a line that reads "ServerPort: 9000" to the configuration file. You can replace the 9000 with some other available port number if you want. If the configuration file does not already exist you can create it. I can't find my URL for Summary? - Summary displays the URL to connect to each time it is started. If you are running your browser on the same machine as Summary, you can use the URL <http://127.0.0.1:9000/>. You can also look up the IP address of the machine running Summary (use winipcfg on Windows 95/98/Me, TCP/IP control panel on Macintosh) and put that address in your browser with the :9000 port number. The reports combine information from all of my domains - By default, Summary reports on all of the entries in all of the log files combined into a single set of reports. You should configure sub-reports to report on each of your individual domains. See the chapter on configuring virtual domains for more information. I want separate reports for each of my domains - Try selecting "Auto Configuration" on the Tools configuration page. A link to the Tools page is located near the bottom of the main configuration page. It will normally suggest ways to create sub-reports for each of your domains. You can also create sub-reports manually and configure each one to report on a different domain. Summary supports up to three domains with their own sets of reports, Summary Plus supports up to 50 domains, Summary SP Lite supports up to 100 domains, and Summary SP support up to 1,000 domains. See the chapter on configuring virtual domains for more information. How do I configure Summary to process log files from multiple servers - Create sub folders in the summary log folder for each server and put the corresponding log files into each folder. The folder name will show up as the "domain" name in Summary and can be used to select log entries for sub-reports. All of my reports are empty - Look at the Program Status report, at the bottom of the Overview or near the bottom left of the Report Menu. 1) Check that "Log files" is at least one. If it is zero, check to see that your log files are in the logs folder and make sure their names do not start with a period. 2) Check that "Valid log entries" is greater than zero. If it is zero, Summary does not understand your log format or none of the files in the logs folder are actually log files. Check to see if your log format is covered in the Log Formats section of the manual. Make sure the log is either not compressed or is compressed with Zip, GZip, or BZip2. 3) Check that the value of "Filtered log entries" is lower than the value of "Valid log entries", if they are equal you have filtered out all of the entries. Check the settings on the Filters configuration page and the Time Units configuration page. Try removing all filtering and see what results you get. Summary is not sending email? - Summary does not send email at the end of a processing run that is triggered manually using the web interface. Make sure that "Send email each processing run" on the Options configuration page is checked. Check to see that you have configured "SMTP server name" to the name of a valid SMTP server on the Miscellaneous configuration page. Set "Comments and questions to email address" to a valid local email address. Make sure "Send report to email address" is configured to a valid email address. For debugging, you might want to set that to your own email address. You can also try sending email from the Tools configuration page and see if Summary reports any errors there. I want a report for last month - On the "Time Units" configuration page there are two settings that allow you to specify a time range. Set "Start processing on (MM/DD/YY)" and set "Stop processing after (MM/DD/YY)" to the last day of the range you want reports for. After you change these date ranges you will need to reprocess the logs. Summary only reports on the last two months even though my logs cover a lot more time - The amount of time that Summary will report on is configurable on the Time Units configuration page. In Summary 1.5.x or older you may also need to check in the Options configuration section "Log file dates may overlap". I disabled several reports. Why are they still there? - When you are accessing Summary with the configuration user name and password you can always see all the reports even if they are disabled. You need to have configured Summary to require a user name and password to access the configuration pages. Otherwise, Summary will assume that everyone is using the configuration name and password. You need to have a browser session where the configuration name and password have never been entered. To get a browser session without the configuration name/password it may be sufficent to quit from the browser and go back in, without using that user name and password. If you have configured your brwoser to remember the name/password you can either clear out that configuration or use a different browser that hasn't had the name/password set. Once you have done that you can see that those reports are actually gone. I configured Summary but it still shows the previous configuration - Some browsers cache the pages from Summary even though Summary tells them not to. One is Surf Express from Connectix, for which you need to hold down option and press reload in Netscape to actually reload the page. Another option is to clear the browser cache or exit the browser and run it again. I changed the configuration but the reports don't reflect the new configuration - You must process the logs again after changing the configuration. Select Process on the Report Menu or the main configuration page. It is also possible that your web browser is still giving you the old report. Press reload in your web browser. Summary mostly works but some of my reports are empty - Various reports require that particular information be in the log files. If your web server is not logging agent information, Summary can not produce the Agent, Browser, Platform, or Web Robots reports. Check the Reports and Log Formats sections of the manual for more information about what information is required for each report. It may be possible to add this information to future logs produced by your web server - check your web server documentation. The CGI Arguments and Cookie reports are disabled by default because they can take a lot of memory and most people would not find them useful. They can be enabled on the Memory configuration page. How to get Summary to start up automatically when the machine is rebooted? - On Windows if you are running Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 you can install Summary as a service. On Macintosh OS X you can install Summary to run at startup. On Linux you can use a cron job running every few minutes to launch Summary. If Summary is already running the launch attempt will be safely ignored. In your cron job you should cd to the Summary folder and then launch Summary. Use a crontab entry something like: */5 * * * * cd /home/summary2.6 ; ./summary >/dev/null How do I get Summary to serve reports through HTTPS? - Summary serves reports with HTTP. If you want to only let customers access reports through HTTPS you can setup a secure proxy server. Setup a secure proxy that redirects to a copy of Summary that is running behind a firewall. You can avoid having to setup a firewall if you run Summary on the same machine as the proxy server and set Summary to serve reports on the IP address 127.0.0.1. That will limit direct access to Summary to only that machine. What can I do when I run out of memory? - There are several things you can do when Summary runs out of memory. The best thing to do is to buy more RAM. You can also reduce the amount of memory Summary needs by processing fewer log files, by setting certain configuration options, or by filtering out a substantial portion of the log entries. Summary uses memory for each unique item. Memory usage is, therefore, not directly related to the size of your log files. Instead, memory usage is proportional to things like the number of unique hosts visiting your web site, the number of unique files available at your web site, etc. If your web site is simple and is used every day by a small number of people, Summary might only need 10 to 30 Meg of RAM, even if your log files were several hundred Gig in size. For very complex web sites with large numbers of unique visitors even one Gig of log files might be too much for Summary to handle without using some of the settings on the Memory configuration page. It is important that you have more physical RAM installed in your machine than Summary says that it is using on the Program Status report. When Summary is using more memory than you have physical RAM it will start to slow down dramatically to the point where it rapidly becomes unusable. Using the techniques described below, you can keep Summary's memory usage within the physical amount of RAM you have installed in your machine. Summary (basic) and Summary Plus are limited to a maximum database size of between 500 and 750 Meg. Summary SP Lite and SP support a database of up to 1.8 to 2.5 Gig, depending on which platform you are running on. When Summary reaches its maximum database size it will say that it's out of memory even if there's additional memory installed in your machine. The Memory configuration page contains several configuration options that can save memory. Appropriate use of Aliases and Filtering can also be used to save memory. The first thing you should do is look at Summary's Program Status report. At the bottom of the report look for the chart showing which data types and which sub-reports are taking most of your memory.
Another approach, that works for almost every data type, is to limit the number of log entries Summary is reading. You can often save memory by filtering out all requests for graphics. Or you can limit the date range that Summary is reporting on. Setting "Number of days to include (0 means all)" to 7 will cause Summary to only report on the most recent week. If you have a very large number of unique files at your site you can save memory by using aliases to combine many different requests into one. For example, if part of your site is an email message archive, with one page per message, you can use aliases to combine all of those messages to look like they are all the same request. When doing this you will want to turn on "Pre-filter local referrers" on the Memory configuration page. When I run Summary it says "Unable to open/create PID file!" - Summary needs to be able to find it's associated files; the "data" folder for example. The first time you run Summary you need to have the current directory be the directory containing the Summary application. After the first time you can either set the "Base Directory" to the absolute path name of the Summary directory or you can continue to run Summary with the current directory set to the Summary directory. Summary also needs to have write permission to the "config", "data", and "reports" directories. When I run Summary, I get the error message "Unable to Acquire Database"? - First, make sure you are quitting all copies of Summary. Normally there is only one copy running at a time, but it is possible to be running more than one copy by accident. Using "ps -ax | grep summary" on Linux, or "ps -ex | grep summary" on Sun will tell you if there are any Summary processes running. Second, try quitting Summary, then delete these three files from Summary's Data folder: "report.dat", "report.str", and "curvisits.gz". If they are not all there, don't worry about it, just delete the ones that are. Then start Summary again, and manually trigger a log processing run. Finally, check your setting and make sure either that "Write reports as HTML files" is off, or that "Maximum number of static HTML pages to write" is one or two. Setting that to a high number can result in the database getting locked for a long time while the reports are written to disk. Summary says "Not Authorized!" and I can't remember what my password is. - Summary doesn't ask for a username and password unless it has been configured to require one. You may have forgotten or misplaced the username and password, or perhaps some other person in your company reconfigured Summary. There are a couple of ways to resolve this problem. One is to quit Summary, edit the configuration file, deleting any lines that start with "AuthName:", "AuthPass:", "ReportName:", or "ReportPass:", then re-run Summary and enter new values. Or, instead of deleting those lines, simply note down the values that you see in the configuration file for those fields and try entering those when Summary prompts for a name/password. Another method is to quit Summary and delete the configuration file and then launch Summary again. This method will require a reconfiguration of everything. The configuration file is called "summary.conf" and is located in the "config" directory. Summary says "Assertion (ref_byte) failed in "StrTablecpp" on line 666 Failed, exiting!". - This is caused by a bug in Summary 2.0.x which is fixed in Summary 2.1 and newer. To clear the error you need to follow these special upgrade instructions. Go to http://summary.net/updates.html and download the appropriate version. Follow the upgrade instructions but don't launch the program right away. If you have previously upgraded, quit Summary. Then do the following: 1. Delete these three files from Summary's Data folder: "report.dat", "report.str", and "curvisits.gz". If they are not all there, don't worry about it, just delete the ones that are. 2. Launch the new version of Summary. 3. Restore a backup (presumably the most recent one). Restore backups can be accessed from the Tools page. There is a link to the Tools page on the main Configuration page. Summary says "Unable to open xyz for serving reports!" - You have configured "IP address to serve on (blank is any)" to an IP address that is not supported by the machine Summary is running on. You will need to edit the Summary configuration file "summary.conf" in Summary's config folder/directory. Delete the line that starts "ServerIP:", save the configuration file, and launch Summary again. I want to know all of the hosts which access a specific document? - Set up filtering to only include requests for that document. You can do this either with sub-report configuration or by setting "Requests/files to ignore" to: +documentname Process your logs and look at the Visitors: Visitors: Hosts report and you will only see visitors which accessed the particular document you are interested in. I want to know all of the documents which were accessed by a particular host? - Set up filtering to only include requests for that host. You can do this by setting "Hosts (visitors) to ignore" to: +hostname Process your logs and look at the content reports and you will only see content which was accessed the host you are interested in. Summary crashes or gives an assertion error on launch. - You may have a corrupt copy of Summary. You should try downloading a fresh copy from our web site. It is also possible that Summary's database is corrupt. This can be worked around by deleting these three files from Summary's Data folder: "report.dat", "report.str", and "curvisits.gz". If they are not all there, don't worry about it, just delete the ones that are. There could also be a bug in log processing if Summary is set to process logs automatically on startup. Moving the Logs folder somewhere else temporarily may work around this problem. How can "Pages Per Visit" show less than one - There are several ways for this to happen. One is that many visitors may link directly to an object that isn't a page, such as a download, which counts as a visit but does not include any pages. Another possibility is graphics hijacking; other sites using your graphics will cause visits that only access graphics. Sometimes people will load a page at your site, but get a copy cached at a proxy server, and then subsequently load one or more of the graphics directly from your server, resulting in a visit that only accesses graphics. All of my host names come out as numbers - The web server can be configured to do DNS lookups which converts the numbers into host names but slows down the web server. If your web server is only logging numeric IP address you should turn on DNS lookups in Summary on the Options configuration page. DNS lookups can take a very long time. It may be some time before the results of the lookups are visible in the reports. How many actual visitors are coming to my web site? - You can never really know exactly how many human people are visiting your site. You can get an approximation. The number of visits and the number of unique hosts are approximations to the number of people. Both of those numbers are reported on the Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly reports. The real number of people is probably somewhere in between those two. You can never really know, because of web robots and proxy servers. A proxy cache used by several people could result in several different people accessing your site from the same IP address and counted as a single visit. It is also possible for a single person to make different requests to your site from multiple IP addresses at the same time. Both of these exceptions are rare, generally accounting for a small portion of all visits. Very high traffic sites tend to experience these exceptions more often.
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Copyright 1998-2008 by Summary.Net - Updated 2/3/06