Introducing . . . Urchin
Urchin 6 is the latest version of Google’s web analytics product
in its non-Google-hosted form. Before the announcement of Urchin 6 in
October 2007 and its launch in mid-April 2008, Urchin 5 was
the mainstream product, installed on thousands of sites worldwide
and widely adopted by web hosting companies as their standard web
analytics offering for clients.
Urchin v5 was the result of 7 years of development and Urchin 6
another three. The product is, in our view, the web analytics
package which presents one of the best combinations of capability,
value and ease of use.
This combination of proven datacentre-class performance with
uncommon ease-of-use makes Urchin often the best choice for
businesses and hosting providers of all sizes. Although it lacks
some of the features of Google Analytics, Urchin is popular with
organisations who wish to store all their visitor data in-house.
Differences between Urchin 6 and Urchin 5
Urchin 6 represents a major upgrade from Urchin v5. It is able
to track much more data, offers advanced cross-segmentation, and has
numerous interface enhancements.
Major improvements include:
Additional
goals and funnel steps
Cross-segmentation
options that allow users to view metrics
sliced into dimensions such as by referring source, keyword,
country, city, browser type, and more
Improved user
interface using presentation-ready Flash-based
graphics instead of SVG
More robust
log processing engine
E-commerce and
campaign tracking included as standard, no longer
as add-ons
A much improved
embedded scheduler to more easily and smoothly
arrange processing and re-processing jobs
Numerous security
enhancements including an updated Apache
web-server
Improved translation
interfaces in all languages
Configuration
database re-designed to use standard relational
backend (including MySQL and PostgreSQL)
Improvements t
clustering capability
Urchin in detail
Urchin is a web analytics system designed to enable businesses to
easily analyze the traffic to their web site(s) and create detailed,
insightful, and intuitive reports. Fundamentally, Urchin is a
server-log analysis program, but its sophisticated unique visitor
reporting goes far beyond what was otherwise available at the time
it was released.
Accurate visitor and session identification is performed by the
Urchin Traffic Monitor. The UTM is a highly accurate system that was
specifically designed to identify unique visitors, sessions, exact
paths, and return frequency behaviour. The JavaScript page tags
which are installed to communicate with the UTM also overcome the
accuracy problems associated with page caching and the intervention
of proxy servers.
Structure and functionality
Urchin consists of 4 primary components:
The Admin Server
The Log-processing
and DNS resolution engine
The Visitor
Interaction Data Architecture (VIDA) database
The Scheduler
The Admin Server is Urchin's central component. It is a web-based
control panel system, powered by a customized Apache web server that
controls all the other Urchin components. The Admin Server lets you
access and control the Urchin system from any computer on the
Internet (by turning on remote access and reporting).
The log-processing and DNS resolution engine does the “heavy
lifting” in the Urchin system, converting large raw log files into
meaningful data, translating IP addresses to domains, and entering
the information into the VIDA database.
The VIDA system is a highly-specialized, optimized, proprietary
database for quickly entering and extracting web analytics data.
This analytics-specific database is a significant part of Urchin's
speed advantage over the competition.
The Scheduler regularly checks the configuration database for
scheduled tasks that need to be run, and executes Urchin to process
them at their scheduled times.
The Urchin Reporting Interface
The Urchin Reporting Interface is the system that displays the
actual Urchin reports. Users may access it by logging in to the
Urchin Administration Interface and selecting a report to view. The
Administrator has access to all reports. Users have access to those
reports specified by the Administrator.
Each Urchin Profile that has been configured has its own set of
reports. By clicking the magnifying glass icon next to a profile, a
user can view the reports for that profile.
Learn more
about Urchin 6 and evaluate or order
Learn more
about Urchin 6 on Google's web site
Learn more
about Urchin 5 on Google's web site
