How SmarterStats Works

There are two main components that work together within SmarterStats: the web interface and the SmarterStats Remote Service.

Web Interface

The Web interface is a browser-based administration platform that installs on a single server and supports all users as well as administrators who are managing the usage of the SmarterStats application. End users use the web interface to check statistics, create filters, create custom reports, and more. System and Site Administrators use the web interface to add, delete or move sites, as well as to check various administrative functions.

The web interface resides on the Management and Reporting Server (MRS). SmarterStats can act as a standalone product that gathers and processes log analytics, display reports and more. When used as a standalone, log files are gathered using FTP, FTPs, UNC paths and other methods. The logs are brought to the MRS, then processed and the reports are generated using that data. All of this is handled by SmarterStats. However, users of distributed networks need a more sophisticated approach: they don't want or need one server gathering and processing millions and millions of lines of log data as it can substantially bog down a server. For these types of installations, the Remote Service is used.

SmarterStats Service

The SmarterStats service is responsible for most of the local processing done by SmarterStats. This includes gathering the log information, processing the log information and communicating results back to the web interface for display. With the Enterprise edition, the service can reside on the same machine as the web interface and/or reside on each separate web server as a Remote Service. This is the primary reason a single web interface can handle up to 30,000 individual websites--the majority of information processing is done on each web server via the Remote Service versus processing on the web interface server. In addition, the local service uses available CPU, but at the lowest priority. This means that if any other application (such as IIS) with a higher priority requires CPU cycles, the stats engine will fall into the background. Setting up a remote service ensures performance of SmarterStats without affecting other applications on the server.