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By Ralph F. Mariano

To begin, we received the software package via email from NetIQ and promptly decided to thoroughly explore the software's power before actually going live. What a mistake we made in thinking we'd need hours to get the program up and running. The user interface is intuitive as well as straight forward.  The guesswork is gone.

Please Note; This review is not intended to be an exercise in "techno-babble" but instead, a first person report in a relaxed, conversational manner.

First, let's get a basic idea of what WebTrends is all about. WebTrends is the e-business intelligence product line from NetIQ, offering a comprehensive set of solutions for web analytics and management. WebTrends' award winning software and e-service solutions provide insights into visitors' behavior and preferences that translate into enhanced business performance, including higher returns on infrastructure and e marketing investments and improved visitor/customer relations.

A little history..

STReport has used one iteration or another of WebTrends for roughly five years. At first, we battled with an ISP (in the beginning) to place WebTrends on their system so we could see our activity reports in action. That was a task. We countered every excuse in the book. That escapade, by the way, began our search for our own facilities. We should thank them for being lackadaisical.

Shortly thereafter, we purchased T1 access, a pair of Netfinity Servers, a Cisco Router, an Adtran CSU/DSU and then promptly proceeded to hook up to the smart jack. Then came the installation of the server software, we decided on Windows 2K Advanced Server.  The server software configuration was not as difficult as we thought it would be. Soon thereafter, we were online from our very own facility. Then the real work began. What with having to grow the hosting service to enable it to pay for itself and of course jumping through all the "wonderful hoops" presented in learning the intricacies of IIS and authoring web sites we eventually became novices. That was a few years back. Now we are novices "grade a".  (a little humility never hurts)

By now, we have a good working knowledge of the entire system (NOC) and get along with it very nicely. WebTrends was there with us all the way. From Enterprise 3 all the way to today with version 7.0b. The program has yet to present any problems.  When needed NetIQ's support is on a level of its own. Superb, superb, superb.

Back to the present....

We initially installed our new WebTrends 7.0b on the server itself... After a few weeks. the decision was made to install WebTrends on another system on the LAN and have that installation "do the job" via our LAN. WebTrends was removed from the server and installed on one of our "power" workstations.

The actual installation of WebTrends is straight forward and painless. Choosing the various reports and methods of getting the job done was as easy. WebTrends is, in our opinion, well written and done so with the user in mind. Using WebTrends does not "test" the user or "tax" the hardware at all. It is fast, virtually transparent and non-intrusive. The machine we have WebTrends installed on, under Windows XP Professional,  runs a myriad of other functions as well as WebTrends. ...Not so much as a peep out of WebTrends. Its all running smooth as silk.

The Bottom line...

Now that we are past the history and preliminaries, let's take a look at the reporting itself.

The table below is a deeper explanation of the chart graph above.  WebTrends leaves very little to "guess work" in its reporting.  Quite thorough and accurate.

Our experience with the reporting that WebTrends offers has been nothing short of complete satisfaction.  Easily, we could repeat this over and over and never feel we were being redundant.

Top Geographic Regions     Geographic Regions Visits 1 North America 27,441 2 Region Unspecified 12,181 3 Western Europe 3,495 4 Asia 2,356 5 Northern Europe 610 6 Australia 515 7 Eastern Europe 430 8 South America 291 9 Region Not Found 160 10 Pacific Islands 83 11 Middle East 82 12 Southern Africa 29 13 Caribbean Islands 25 14 Central America 9 Total for the Geographic Regions above 47,707

So you wanted to know where your action was coming from... well this is just the beginning.  This gets broken down even further. The chart below offers an activity report on two different servers; our web server and our ftp server.  WebTrends is easily configured to do so. Most Active Countries     Countries Visits 1 United States 25,598       STRWEB01 25,329       STRFTP 269 4 Japan 2,139       STRWEB01 2,139 6 Canada 1,583       STRWEB01 1,572       STRFTP 11 9 United Kingdom 874       STRWEB01 873       STRFTP 1 12 Australia 515       STRWEB01 508       STRFTP 7 15 Belgium 470       STRWEB01 467       STRFTP 3 18 Netherlands 446       STRWEB01 446 20 France 432       STRWEB01 431       STRFTP 1 23 Germany 361       STRWEB01 361 25 Spain 352       STRWEB01 349       STRFTP 3 28 Italy 309       STRWEB01 307       STRFTP 2 31 Mexico 260       STRWEB01 260 33 Sweden 223       STRWEB01 223 35 Poland 218       STRWEB01 218 37 Denmark 204       STRWEB01 204 39 Austria 172       STRWEB01 172 41 Brazil 164       STRWEB01 161       STRFTP 3 44 Switzerland 160       STRWEB01 159       STRFTP 1 47 Finland 136       STRWEB01 134       STRFTP 2 50 Taiwan 79       STRWEB01 79 Total for the Countries above 34,695 Had enough charts?  If you want to see a complete report prepared by WebTrends Enterprise Suite 7.0b, click here and you'll see the entire report for STReport Magazine's monthly activity.

NetIQ has taken WebTrends to levels of performance we had never imagined they'd go.  If you're looking for a reporting tool that'll provide you with the "real skinny", (the whole truth and nothing but the truth), WebTrends is the answer. Actually, at this point in time we'd be lost without WebTrends.

Tech Support...

Now, here's a touchy subject with most everyone.  Mention tech support and all you hear are the horror stories about busy signals, more busy signals, holding on in queue forever, the horrible background music or constant procession of advert blurbs, the incessant urgings to "leave a number and we'll get back to you within 24hrs" and finally, the worst.. "we're sorry your hold time is approximately 62 minutes would you like to leave a message or call back at a later time?"

Real Tech Support...

With NetIQ that sort of grist mill does not exist.  We make it our business to "try" tech support for every product we review.  We feel tech support is a vital and extremely important part of every software offering on the market.

To make a long story short.. we made a series of "tech support" calls to WebTrends.  The phones were never "busy".  By that I mean, its fairly obvious NetIQ takes tech support seriously.  They must have an excellent in house phone system as we never encountered a problem reaching tech support.

The Personal Touch... 

Here's the best part... the tech support people themselves.  We spoke to five, different tech support technicians.  Each and every one of them were polite, cordial, knowledgeable, spoke English well and best of all... never replied with a; "talk down to you attitude".  Believe me, we prepared some pretty ridiculous questions. 

One question in particular stands out.. It went like this; "We run some games like Diablo2 on our workstation that has WebTrends scheduler running on it as a service.  After we're finished playing the game, the scheduler does not run.. Why?"  Instead of either busting out laughing or acting peculiar, the tech support person (quite professionally) replied that we should consider a re-boot after using software of that nature.  There is no doubt the tech support folks at NetIQ are professional, courteous and know their products well. They get an A+.

STReport highly recommends WebTrends for anyone needing accurate reporting of hits, visits, page views, source of visits etc.. and analysis. A truly Complete Activity Report.

Finally, in closing, we voted to award NetIQ and WebTrends 7.0b our Editor's Choice Award for excellence in programming, documentation, tech support and product updates.