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NetTracker Lite Review vs AWStats

NetTracker Lite A few days ago I wrote about gathering website statistics and a couple of gripes I had with AWStats. George Smith commented that I should try NetTracker Lite. So I did.

First I spent quite a bit of time going through their online demo. Very nice indeed! It replicated all of the statistics I gather from AWStats and filled in the gaps that I thought AWStats didn’t fill. After spending an hour or so going through the demo I decided to download the program and give it a shot.

Problems immediately. During installation I got the following error:

An error was encountered while running the InstallationCheck tool for “NetTracker-Lite-App.”

So much for installation. So I headed over to their Support Forums. It seems like no moderators have posted there in nearly a month. Doesn’t look like I’ll get any help there although I admit I have not posted an inquiry there because even if I did get assistance NetTracker Lite isn’t the product for me…

NetTracker Lite doesn’t run from the command line. It is a normal “double click on me” application. So I can’t run it from my headless Xserve. Sure I could install Remote Desktop or VNC on my Xserve, but I don’t want to. Everything else I need to do on the Xserve I can do from the command line.

Further, I noticed two little tidbits in the NetTracker Lite documentation I had missed before:

  • A maximum of one million page views can be analyzed.
  • A maximum of one Web site can be analyzed.

Until I decide to purchase Urchin, AWStats will do fine.

Tim Flight
Analyzing the Analyzers

Explore posts in the same categories: Computer Technology, Website Development

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 at 9:09 am and is filed under Computer Technology, Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Comment on “NetTracker Lite Review vs AWStats”

  1. Tim Flight Says:
    June 3rd, 2005 at 10:34 pm

    Frank Faubert of Sane Solutions responded to me privately about my entry. I’m adding his response here as it contains some valuable information not seen on their website. Looks like there is a command-line version of the software available. He also addressed some of the other apparent limitations of the software.

    Hi Tim,

    I saw your blog post about NetTracker Lite in my saved Technorati search for NetTracker. First, thank you for trying out and writing about NetTracker Lite. However, I wanted to respond to a few of the things that you wrote.

    We actually do have a command line version of NetTracker Lite for Mac OS X (http://www.nettrackerlite.com/download/NetTracker-7.5-Lite-Darwin.tar.gz), though it wasn’t linked to from the download page. We’ll change that. If I may ask a question, how would you recommend labeling the two different builds to avoid confusion?

    Also, we really need to clarify our position on “A maximum of one Web site can be analyzed”, as we’ve gotten a few questions on that. The one web site limitation is meant more as a comparison against our commercial product line, where large organizations like to manage all web sites in a single installation of NetTracker. That said, it is not our intention or desire to restrict you from installing multiple copies of NetTracker Lite in different directories to track multiple web sites.

    As for the one million page view limit, not much I can really say about that. NetTracker Lite is our freeware offering targeted for small and low-traffic web sites. Our commercial NetTracker product line does not have this limitation.

    Again, thanks for trying out and writing about NetTracker Lite!

    Sincerely,
    Frank Faubert
    Sane Solutions, LLC

    Website: http://www.sane.com