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April 12, 1999

Examining All Angles

Accrue's Web-traffic analysis tool now captures more data

By Justin Hibbard

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ccrue Software Inc. this week will release the third version of its Web-traffic analysis software, Insight. The upgrade helps capture Web user data that most site-analysis tools can't detect.

Called post parameters, these types of data often contain important information, such as a user's registration or identification, that tells a Web server how to build a dynamic page. Insight 3.0 also captures data from any field in a cookie--a bit of code on a browser that identifies a user and the pages that user has viewed. Earlier versions of Insight captured only the top field of a cookie.

Eastman Kodak Co. has been using an earlier version of Insight on its Kodak.com site and plans to upgrade to version 3.0. "It's hard to analyze the traffic for some of the applications we build because the parameters for what users are clicking on are in the post," says Terry Lund, director of Internet initiatives at Kodak.

Also important to Kodak are scalability enhancements in Insight 3.0. Accrue says the product can now store up to 190 Gbytes of data in its built-in data warehouse and can collect user data from more than 2,000 copies of Web server software running on as many as 1,000 boxes, enabling it to handle millions of hits per day. Kodak runs 18 copies of Netscape Enterprise Server on six Unix boxes, which serve about 300,000 page views a day. "Scalability is a big issue for us," Lund says.

It's a big issue for a lot of people, analysts say. "As the Web takes off as a legitimate business channel, scalability is an issue many IT managers and all Web-traffic analysis companies are wrestling with," says Donovan Gow, an analyst at Aberdeen Group.

Insight 3.0, priced from $17,000, also offers advanced data mining tools and can export report data into spreadsheets for presentations.