SYNOPSIS

Input

A stream of records.

Output

A stream of records that describes the observed transitions.

DESCRIPTION

This tool monitors users movements, typically on a web site. The tool counts the transitions from one position to another during a certain period referred to as the transition period.

EXAMPLES

It is possible to count transitions on a web site, i.e. monitor how many unique clients browse directly from one url to another url. In this setup the clients are uniquely identified by their IP addresses.

This can be achieved by following these steps: Make sure the Transition tool receives the fields client_ip and url.

Note
 Extract HTTP outputs client_ip, but not url. The url field can constructed by concatenation of the host and uri field. The demo script url.py programs the Script tool to do just that.

Select client_ip in the Identifier Key field and url in the Position Key field. Save the output of the Transition tool in a database table. When you analyze the database table containing the output of the Transition tool, you can see numbers indicating how many clients browsed from one url to another url (indicated by the to_url and from_url fields in the database table, respectively).

The data could look something like this:

timestamp 2003-07-15 10:22:24
from_url www.my_site.com/my_texts/introduction.php
to_url www.my_site.com/my_texts/enter_user_data.php
transition_count 17

This should be interpreted as: On 17 occasions during the transition period a client went directly from the url www.my_site.com/my_texts/introduction.php to the url www.my_site.com/my_texts/enter_user_data.php.

OPTIONS

Duration (seconds)

Time period in seconds to count transitions over — the transition period.

Identifier Timeout (seconds)

How long an inactive identifier key lives.

Position Key

The field key to identify a position.

Identifier Key

The field key to identify a unique user.