Transaction Log Analysis
•Initial transaction log studies were conducted during summer prior to full-scale launch
•Studies revealed activity at the database level
•Studies identified databases with connection problems
•Ongoing studies are needed to influence service design modifications
Our usage log analysis allowed us to observe user behavior without being intrusive and possibly influencing user results.  Since this initial analysis was done during the summer, you should know that we had not made a full cutover to the new system yet.  That is, we had the old e-Reference system working in parallel with the new Find Databases/Find Articles system from May 19th until mid August, when we eliminated the old system completely.  This meant that our analysis of the new system logs would not give us a true picture of how the system would perform at full capacity.  However, it gave us an opportunity to set up the initial analysis on a smaller, more manageable data set.  We had plans for rerunning the analysis once the new system completely replaced e-Reference.

Our data set for the summer analysis came from the Oracle tables in ENCompass and the Apache web logs.  We hired a Communications Department graduate student to run Microsoft Access queries on data from both sources, thanks to a Perl script a project team member wrote, which parsed relevant data from the voluminous Apache logs. Even with this script, we quickly found that merging the two data sets was problematic.  For example, the date and timestamps for each session did not line up in exactly the same way, and whereas Apache contained much more raw data, it actually did not contain the kind of detailed information within each session that the Oracle tables in ENCompass offered.

This said, we did gain some valuable information through the analysis.  Our student used Microsoft Excel to present the data analysis in the form of charts and graphs.  I will show you a few examples of what we found…