Selective Logging

A recent question from a client related to why data for part of their site wasn't appearing in their web analytics data (they happen to be using NetInsight).

For reasons that aren't important, this customer isn't using page tags, instead using the raw IIS server logfiles.

They had inadvertently deselected the 'log visits' checkbox for that portion of the site. This was duly re-enabled and the logging then continued and everyone was happy.

Click to enlarge.

Of course logging is generally configured at the ISS site level, but there is an opportunity here to do something a bit smart...

How about de-selecting this for your common /assets, /images folders? This would shrink your logfiles, prevent you from having to strip the logfiles afterwards (as some people do) and you still get the benefits of then compressing the logs.

This is all rather low-tech, most people are going to be using page tags and many people aren't using IIS (although selective logging is perfectly feasible (and even more flexible) with Apache).

This is a really obvious thing, but it's never something that I'd thought of before.