Web service metrics

Anonymous User

I am looking for a tool to measure the usage of our gis server services and applications. 
We need to measure which maps are being used, by whom, when, from where?  I am currently looking at Optimizer from Latitude Geographics,  Geosystems Monitor from Vestra, and Splunk.  How do you measure and report your usage?  Is there a tool from ESRI that does this?

WilliamCraft

It helps to state which version of ArcGIS you are using when making a post.  To answer your question though, here are two ways you can derive usage information (although there are other methods besides just these):

Mine the ArcGIS Server Logs
Starting at 10.1, the ArcGIS Server Administrator API allows you to mine information about individual services in order to get usage information, which is covered here.  To go a step further, you can automatically construct a feature class with the most highly-requested extents based on the example provided here.  If you're clever with Python, you'll be able to collect some additional information using similar techniques.  If you're using ArcGIS 10.0 or earlier, you can still parse the ArcGIS Server log files (.DAT files) but you'll have to get a bit more complex with the scripting (which can be done using Windows batch, PowerShell, or Python scripting). 

Parse the IIS W3SVC Web Logs
The W3SVC log files (typically located at C:/WINDOWS/system32/LogFiles/W3SVC1 on a Windows 2003 machine) show the GET and POST requests made to the website from client machines.  The information typically includes the URL being requested along with a file download size, a time/date stamp, the client IP address, and a return code (200, 404, 403, 500, etc.).  You can use Windows batch scripting, PowerShell, or Python scripting to periodically parse the most current log file for the information you care about. 

I have evaluated the GeoSystems Monitor application in depth.  It's a pretty nice tool for collecting metrics, but the statistics backend data store for storing the usage information must be SQL Server or SQLite.  Oracle is not supported at this time, although that may not impact you. 

If the response I provided answers your question, please mark the correct answer with the green check.