The OpenEye Web Tracker is a web based application that monitors and logs requests made to your website, allowing you to view reports and statistics about who visits your website and which pages are visited.
For quite some years now, I have been testing different web tracking systems available online. Most of these services, being free, had limitations in the way they performed user tracking. Some displayed only the last 10 visitors, some others the last 100 pages visited, some logged only users with a browser as agent, leaving you with no idea about how often and which search bots are indexing your site. Another big problem was the fact that export capabilities of these free services were almost equal to nothing and, when they existed, would leave you with lots of work to do in order to compile the exported data and use it properly.
Since I did not want want to pay for expensive services and the free services were not really providing the information I was looking for, I decided to develop my own web tracking system and that's how OpenEye came to life!
Technical Details
The OpenEye Web Tracker uses the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and the IIS web server as platform and it was developed in C#. By default, MySQL is used to store data, even though SQL Server will be introduced in a second phase of the development. You'll be able to decide which one to use when installing the software.
Taking in consideration the use of MySQL or MS SQL Server as backend databases, the OpenEye Web Tracker uses the .Net DatabaseHandler 2.0 for database connectivity. As you can read, this data provider is intended to work in the database layer of your .NET applications (Windows or Web Forms) and allows you to connect to different versions of MS SQL Server, MS Access, MySQL and Oracle.
Features
So what's included? Well, a web tracker, as the name suggests, tracks users that visit a website and the pages these users request. So, this web tracker is not different than the others! :)
Here is the list of the information that is logged about the visitor:
IP Address
Operating System
Browser name
Browser version
Country
Pages requested
Referrer
Search engine keywords
Search engine bots
With the information logged it is possible to produce different types of reports such as:
A list of visitors including IP Address, time of visit, browser name and version, operating system, time online, referrer, pages visited and the order of requests (also known as click path)
Average of daily visitors
Average of daily visitors requests
Average of daily bots
Average of daily bots indexed pages
Most Popular pages
Browser statistics
Operating System Statistics
Country statistics
Referrer statistics
Browser statistics, including browser version
Besides logged and statistical data, the OpenEye Web Tracker as a few more features:
User Management: specify which users may login and use the application
Backup: make backups of the logged data so that nothing gets lost
Clean contents: do you want a new start? Delete all the stored data and move on!
IP Filter: exclude IP addresses that should not be logged like the IP address at home or work
This app is no longer being developed.