Serlog Technical Support
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Error: No events qualified for processing.
2. Error: Out of Memory.
3. How should IIS be configured?
4. Our style sheet is listed as a popular entry page.
5. What advantages does Serlog have over Google Analytics?
If you still can't solve the problem, you may contact our technical support department. However, please be aware of the following:
- Email support is unlimited and free. Telephone support must be approved and scheduled in advance.
- Technical support can assist with the software's configuration, but within limits. Sometimes configuration requires intimate knowledge of your business and may necessitate a Systems Analyst.
- Technical support is staffed Monday through Friday, 10:00am - 6:00pm Central Time (GMT-6:00). Of course, you can send us email any time.
Click here to send an email to Gammadyne Technical Support. We value your feedback and appreciate your interest in our software!
Answers
This usually indicates that the log data is not being interpreted correctly. Use the "Test Interpretation" tool (on the Tools menu) to see how the log data is interpreted. Make sure there are no warnings in the "Warnings" column. If there are, or if it appears that the log data is not being correctly interpreted, go to the Settings tab, set the Log Format to "(custom)", and manually configure the Custom Log Format table.
If Serlog is reporting an "Out of Memory" error, we recommend taking the following actions:
- Make sure the "Domain" field on the Settings folder is specified.
- Check the "Consolidate Referrers" box on the Settings folder.
- Restart Serlog between separate Analyze operations.
- If one log is much bigger than all others due to some sort of attack, delete all lines from the log containing the IP address of the attacker.
- Reduce the number of logs being analyzed.
By default, IIS 6 does not log the "Referrer" or bandwidth data. This prevents the Bandwidth, Misreferrals, Referrals, Search Engines, and Search Keywords reports from working. Follow this procedure to force IIS to log this information:
- Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager > Web Sites > [your website] > Properties.
- On the Web Site tab, set Active Log Format to "W3C Extended Log File Format".
- Click the "Properties" button. Switch to the "Advanced" tab.
- Make sure the following options are checked:
Date ( date )
Time ( time )
Client IP Address ( c-ip )
Method ( cs-method )
URI Stem ( cs-uri-stem )
Protocol Status ( sc-status )
Bytes Sent ( sc-bytes )
Bytes Received ( cs-bytes )
User Agent ( cs(User-Agent) )
Referer ( cs(Referer) ) - Click OK twice and exit the IIS manager.
A style sheet can appear to be a popular entry page if it is referred to by any file type that requires server-side processing, such as PHP, CGI, or ASP. What happens is that the processed file appears later in the server log than it should, due to the processing overhead. This makes it appear like the style sheet was requested first, even though it was not. The only solution to this problem is to exclude the style sheet from the report. We recommend checking the "Pages Only" box.
Serlog can be a valuable source of information that Google Analytics cannot provide. Specifically:
- Google Analytics can only track hits on HTML files.
- Google Analytics does not offer the following reports: Bandwidth, Directories, File Types, Misreferrals, Search Engines, Spiders.
- Google Analytics can only track conversions that originate from Google Adwords.
- The Search Keyword report in Google Analytics only includes keywords that originate from Google.
- Google Analytics cannot track HTTP requests that produce an error.
- Google Analytics cannot graph data for a subset of files. For example, we often use Serlog to produce a graph of the number of downloads of Gammadyne Mailer.
- Google Analytics only keeps data for 2 years.
- Google Analytics requires tracking code to be inserted into every web page.