Website data logging

[Mudsaf]

Hello, i'm wondering do you guys log user data what they do.

 

• New user registerations
• Logins & Logouts
• Page visits

and other kind of form post information that the user does. Example I tried to make logging system & having over 70000 logs there (98% prob page refreshes). Also what mehod? .txt file or SQL-table?

Edited August 29, 2013 by Mudsaf

[justsomeguy]

I store logs in the database and periodically archive them to a different table. Right now one of the large clients has about 200,000 entries in the active log and about 6.5 million entries in the archive. That might sound like a lot, but the same client has another table with 35 million records in it. The table only has 2 integer columns with a composite primary key and takes up 3.6GB of space.

[Mudsaf]

So basically i should do my logging with example TinyINT maxlength 3?

ColumnsID (INT, AI, PRIMARY) | PROCESS (TINYINT 3, NOT NULL) | PROCESS2 (TINYINT3, NOT NULL) | IP (VARCHAR 15)1 | 1 | 1 | 127.0.0.1//Example ID, <page>, <what happened there>, <ip-address>

Edited August 29, 2013 by Mudsaf

[justsomeguy]

That would help keep the size of the log table to a minimum. Most log entries have additional arbitrary text data associated with them though, except for static events (like a user logging in).

[Mudsaf]

Well ill try to keep it at minimum, thanks for info. With 2x process i can track if user login logout. I have actually 10x10x10 (1000) options i could make with combinations on one page.

 

Example Process 2

0 = Visit1 = Login2 = Logout3 = Form post success4 = Form post failure5 = MySQL error //Other than connection//.. and so on, ofc i have page data + user ip + other stuff up also.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Mudsaf

[justsomeguy]

I understand, the additional data I'm referring to would be things specific to the event. If the event is an error, then the additional data would be an error code or error message or information about what they were doing. It's hard to assign a single number to that data. On my application, for example, if someone changes a piece of content or changes details about their account then the log message includes both the old and new data so that we can have an audit trail. It's more than just a finite list of possible messages. For yours, you probably want to know which form was being processed, and if it is a failure then what the failure was (which might include logging the submitted data). If it is a MySQL error, then you would probably want to record the error number or error message and the query, filename, and line number that caused it.