Case Study

On Track ...
An on-line content publisher needs to know the value of the resource they provide. How valuable is the content to the people that use it? How many people log-on at a time? How long do they stay? How valuable a resource are we? To answer these questions on-line content publishers use a web usage reporting system.

The Challenge
An established on-line content publisher needed to upgrade its usage reporting system for its Web-base applications. They had outgrown their first generation reporting tools and needed a more flexible and scalable method for generating and distributing usage reports for any number of on-line products. The first generation tool was very limited and required a great deal of manual intervention — but had proven effective in defining what reporting was needed and demonstrating the demand for a functional tool.
The publisher wanted a usage reporting system that would:

collect and normalize data from a number of different web applications
store usage information in a DB2 database
generate a standard set of reports (a superset of the first generation’s usage reports)
automatically generate reports at regular intervals (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly)
track and report usage activity by product and client
present report data in three different output forms: Plain Text, HTML, CSV (loadable into Excel, or another database)
automatically distribute reports to a list of authorized subscribers
provide an extensible system so that as new reports and products are made available they can be easily integrated into the system
provide a web based application to manage report subscriptions
ship usage reports to clients to give feed back on use of various online services and products
automatically run data load, reporting and distribution functions providing support personnel with monitoring information on the health of the system

Initially the system would be used for four different on-line products, but it was expected that over time all of the companies products will tie into this reporting system. It was expected the number of reports that were generated would also expand over time. Several hundred subscribers were anticipated at the launch of the system with the expectation that the report subscription list could expand to thousands of recipients. The publisher was impressed with Myxa’s technical accumen and appreciated Myxa’s input in defining the system and anticipating the demands for growth and extension. They chose Myxa.

The Engineered Approach
Myxa recognized that this reporting system would be the beginning of a much larger system that over time would expand into a number of different application areas. Therefore, Myxa felt it was important to design this system to be extensible. Once the internal recipients of these reports recognized the potential of having a database-driven usage reporting system new requests
and uses of this data would surface. The Usage Reporting System would have five distinct components:

log extraction utilities
data load and normalization
data store in a DBMS
reporting programs
subscription/distribution management component

Myxa’s development methodology and toolsets used for this product provided a highly portable application, that was supported (and tested) on three different Unix operating systems (AIX, Solaris and Linux) and two databases (DB2 and Oracle).

The Result
The Reporting system has proven very effective. The system is heavily used — distributing many thousands of reports to a subscription database of several hundred recpients.

Within the first month of use, several new products were integrated into the reporting facility. The customer has begun to standardize on the simpler logging specification that Myxa created for new products as part of this project. This simpler log specification reduces the amount of work that the Web application code historically performed to keep track of usage. Because logged data is loaded into the centralized usage database on a nightly basis, application code no longer needs to maintain logging information over time, but now relies on the DB2 database to retain historical data.

Adding new reports to the system has become easy, since these reports are written against the database and the output stored in a common location. The subscription report distribution facility provides a mechanism to distribute these new reports to individuals who are authorized to receive them.

For more information, visit our website at http://www.myxa.com.