The deadly WebTrends “Re-Analyze” button
Applies to: Software
“Danger!”
“Don’t remind me of old heartbreak.”
“Aargh.”
These are a few of the reactions by Outsiders to mentions of the Re-Analyze function in WebTrends.
To its credit, WebTrends a while ago renamed it to ”Clear Analysis Data” and shows a warning when asking you to confirm this action: “Any previously analyzed data will be lost.”
However, in 8.1 WebTrends renamed it again, back to “Re-Analyze.” Confusion and danger return.
Let’s make that little warning really clear. It means: Should you go ahead with a re-analyze, ALL previous processing will be erased, along with all WebTrends-controlled backups. Your configurations stay, but WebTrends deletes all statistics and all backups and starts analysis over with the earliest raw data it can find.
The old data is really gone. There is no “restore” unless you have a tape backup.
It can ruin your day.
Experienced WebTrends users instead use this simple alternative: create a clone (copy) of the profile and analyze it. When it’s done and you’ve checked it, you can delete the original.
And never touch “Re-Analyze.”
7 comments
Been there, done that.. not going there again.
I guess this only concerns the profile which is being ‘re analysed’ and doesn’t delete ALL processing and backups? I’ll be avoiding it anyway, but just to confirm…..
Correct. Only that profile.
So, if I run “Re-Analyze” on a copy of the profile, do I lose all the stuff on the original, too?
Mike – No. A copy is completely separate from the original, and changes to the clone, including Re-Analyze, happen only in the clone.
So if I implement a change on a profile – add a new custom report or filter that I want to be applied to the data from the beginning, would I just apply it and then hit “Analyze now”? Or does that require you to re-analyze?
If you want analysis from the beginning, you have to either re-analyze the profile OR you can leave that profile alone, create a fresh empty profile with that report or filter, and analyze all the available old data. The latter is what I do all the time, thanks WebTrends for making it easy to create clones of profiles.
“Analyze Now” will cause the profile to look for any new data (since the last time it did analysis) and analyze that very recent data. Of course, your new custom report will be analyzed too … but only with the smidge of data that has happened since you last analyzed.
“Re-analyze” will erase everything and start over, and your new report will be included and have old data, just like all the other re-analyzed reports.
This is one of the big differences between WebTrends’ general processing and that of a couple of its competitors. It’s frustrating to not be able to easily create completely new tabulations that are immediately retroactive, but on the other hand it encourages you to think of the reports you think you might someday need in advance and create them early on. It’s a lot like OLAP data cubing – you have to make choices about what’s in the cube. Besides, a lot of filtering for existing individual reports can be easily done with ODBC and SQL queries.
This linear, forward-only model allows WebTrends processing to be extra-efficient and is probably the reason why WebTrends can be licensed as software and run on your own equipment – re-analyzing as much as you want at no cost. In my view, it makes ownership of the software (rather than On Demand) imperative for dynamic situations where you’re constantly coming up with new questions. If you have the ability to re-analyze old data whenever you want, wow, you can really kick some ass.
What WebTrends needs to do, besides making custom reporting front and center in its interface and training and selling, is to have a lot more built-in reports out of the box (these are just custom reports that WebTrends creates and adds to profiles before selling the product). And have wizards or app guides that help you think of reports you are likely to want in the future.
People who know their way around WebTrends are really pleased with the power of the tool, and are doing some rather amazing analyses. People fresh to WebTrends often see the tool as simple compared to some others. Not so.
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