Reporting Quick Guide

This guide will help you get the most from your reports. In this guide you will learn how: Wavecrest delivers the most accurate results, and why we are trusted by large organizations such as the U.S. Department of Justice Wavecrest determines visits, hits, and download time To quickly get the detailed data you need at the click of your mouse Reports can help you spot instances of abuse based on your Web policy To customize reports to get only the data you need

Accurate Results
Accuracy is very important because Web-use reports are often used as the basis for sensitive personnel actions and evidence in court. In both areas, erroneous information can lead to disastrous results. Wavecrest has a couple of ways to ensure the accuracy of its reports. The most important by far is to report actual human click actions (visits or 'page views') separately from automatically generated extraneous hits (ads, banners, graphics, audio, etc.). You have the option of viewing Only Visits or All Hits in reports. Visit The act of clicking on a URL or hyperlink to request that a Web page or other object be downloaded. The typical Web page contains many different elements that are downloaded separately. To gauge the level of Web-use activity, this product emphasizes Visit counts. Unlike Hits, Visits counts how many Web pages a user actually requested, not all the elements downloaded as a result of those requests. Hit A typical Web page is made up of many different elements (i.e., text, images, banner ads, audio, flash, etc.). When you click on a URL and a Web page is being loaded in your browser, each of those elements is downloaded separately. As a result, clicking on a single URL can generate multiple logfile entries, one for each element downloaded. Each of these downloads represents a hit. On average, 70% of all hits are elements downloaded as a result of a user clicking on a hyperlink. Download Time It is not possible to calculate the amount of time a user was online or viewing a particular page. The fact that a user downloaded a Web page to a browser doesn't necessarily mean that he or she was actually looking at that page while it was "open." Download time is defined as the absolute smallest amount of time to completely download a Web page (or visit), multiplied by the number of visits. The smallest amount of time to download a Web page is set to 3 seconds, e.g., 100 Web pages multiplied by 3 seconds each equals 300 seconds of estimated download time. The Download time is listed in DD:HH:MM:SS format where DD = Days, HH = hours, MM = minutes, and SS = seconds. Denied Visit Denied requests for a Web page signifies the user may not be authorized to receive the page, or the page may not have been found by the Web server, or the page may have been blocked for access. Failed Visit Failed requests for a Web page possibly signifies a site may be down or does not exist anymore. Unsolicited or Push This activity is any server push traffic, such as Infogate. This activity is not a mouse-click by the user and is therefore not considered a visit.

Interactive Reporting
Interactive Reporting gives you the ability to drill down from a high level report to a more detailed Web use report by simply clicking on a reports elements, e.g., ID Name, Category, or Classification. For example, if you are currently looking a Site Analysis report and want to get more detailed Web-use data on a specific user, just click on that users ID Name and a User Audit Detail report will run. Do you have Interactive Reporting enabled? Interactive Reporting is disabled by default. This is because you can only run Interactive Reports on Web data stored in the Wavecrest Database. To use Interactive Reporting, your product administrator must enable the Wavecrest Database. Administrators can get detailed instructions on the Database and Interactive Reporting from the product manual.

Automatic Abuse Detection

Reports use a color-coding system based on your classification and abuse thresholding settings to help you immediately find instances of Web abuse. Classification Each category is rated based on your organizations Acceptable Use Policy. The classification ratings are Acceptable, Unacceptable, and Neutral. Every report is color coded based on your classification settings. Acceptable is green, Unacceptable is orange, and Neutral is gray. Abuse Thresholding Set the number of Web visits allowed to each category in a 24-hour period based on your Web-use policy. On reports, you will notice that visits within the allowed period are color coded blue, and when a threshold is exceeded, the colored bar turns red. Abuse Thresholding can be enabled when creating report. The Report Request Parameters will tell you whether Thresholding is enabled or disabled.

Customize Your Reports

There are several ways that you can tailor Wavecrest reports to get the data you need. Select the report you want and choose which Groups and/or IDs and categories will appear in the report. Customize your reports by selecting: From Several Reports Wavecrest offers 18 different high and low-level reports to give you several different views of Web-use activity. For example, a Site Analysis report gives you a good overview of Web activity based on classification, categories, and users. However, you may only be interested in Web-use activity to Unacceptable categories. In this case, you can run an Unacceptable Visits report instead. This can save you a tremendous amount of time by getting only the data you want to see. If you want even more detailed Web-use data, down to the actual URL, get a low-level User Audit Detail report or a Category Audit Detail report. Groups and IDs There are several ways of selecting which employees to include in your reports. Reports can be run on the entire organization (Enterprise), groups within the organization (Accounting Dpt., Marketing Dpt., etc.), sub-groups, and even individual IDs. Categories You can select which categories you want to see in reports. For example, you may only want to see Web activity on those categories that you deem unacceptable. Wavecrest's products let you select those categories so that they are all you see in your reports.