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Updated: May 8, 2007

UW Shibboleth IdP statistics: method

Statistics Shibboleth  Shib2 stats  Yesterday  Last 7 days  Last 30 days  Last 6 months  by host UW CA  Certificates in use

The statistics presentation consists of a few timed steps, all managed by cron. Note that the downloadable samples are tailored for our particular combination of hosts and OS types. They are not intended to be portable without modification by you. A log filter script runs each night to copy and filter yesterday's access logs to a log summary area. Log records are filtered to select just the attribute and authentication notices. They are reformated to show the IdP system (for clustered IdPs), the type of assertion, the remote provider id, and the local userid. Other sites might want to collect other information but this works for this purpose. Note that copying the files can be a bit tricky, as it involves access to a remote system by a script. We use a combination of scp and NFS. A script runs each night after (1) and uses the plotting program (3) to generate the plots and tables for various time periods, 7 days, 30 days, etc. The plotting program scans the log summary records and produces a jpg (or png) plot and table output. It uses the EZPlot plotting package and some commonly available graphical libraries, e.g. libgd. A plot is included in a web page with (for example) <td colspan=9><img src="/fox/stats/last7.jpg"></td> A usage table is included in a web page (a .shtml, in this example) <!--#include virtual="last7.sum" -->

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