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How do I get the Server Cluster Load Balance report to populate with data?

Products

Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Webtrends Analytics 9.x

Cause

You wish to report on the efficiency of your load balanced web servers and you would like to know how to get the Server Cluster Load Balance report to populate with data.

Resolution


The following steps will enable Webtrends to display report data related to web server load balancing:

1. Create a unique data source that points to the log files for each web server.
2. Creating a profile for the data source and check the box for “Advanced profile options.”
3. When proceeding through the new profile wizard, select “My web site is on multiple physical machines” under “Site Configuration.”
4. On the Data Sources option, select “New” and enter the name of the first web server and select the corresponding data source. Repeat for each web server and data source combination.
5. Complete the rest of the profile setup.

Edit the template used by the profile, select content, then highlight the section under which you would like the load balance report to show up.
Click a report and select “Built-in report Library,” then scroll down to the Site performance > Technical Statistics section and select “Server Cluster Load Balance.”

Tracking load-balanced web servers using the SmartSource Data Collector:
If your site is hosted on multiple servers, a server cluster, or a server farm, and you want to evaluate the performance of your load balancer, WebTrends can track page views for each server. To do so, populate the following META tag on all pages on each server:

This meta tag defines the name of the machine that serves the web page. If you have two servers (server1 and server2), you would make two copies of the META tag and designate CONTENT=?server1? for deployment to pages on the first server and CONTENT=?server2? for deployment to the same pages on the second server.

For a server farm, extract the value of the built-in server name and dynamically assign it to the META tag.

Sample Log File:
After the JavaScript interacts with this META tag information, it generates log file entries that look something like the following:

2004-03-04 00:08:18 proxy7.hotmail.com – W3SVC3 web1 192.168.1.1 GET /ads/default.asp redir=products&ad=http%3A//www.phonedealer.com&WT.sv=Server1 …

As shown above, the META-related information is appended as a query parameter and all values of WT.sv will populate the Server Cluster Load Balance report.