New Features in Urchin 6


What are the main differences between Urchin 5 and 6?

Major Features

  • Up to 1000 profiles (domains), log sources, e-commerce, and campaign tracking all included with base license; no add-on modules
  • Individual visitor-level tracking, including session (path) data
  • Comprehensive SEO/SEM campaign tracking features, 4 goals per profile
  • Rich cross-segmenting available from most reports
  • Full suite of visitor geo-location reports (not just visitor domain)
  • Processing speed roughly on par with Urchin 5 but with much richer reports

Platform Support

  • Broad range of Linux platforms supported with only 2 builds (Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels)
  • Added support for FreeBSD 5 and FreeBSD 6
  • Dropped support for MacOS X and Solaris (may be reconsidered if sufficient demand is demonstrated)

Installers

  • Windows installer is now distributed as an MSI package, better unattended install support, integration with SMS

Configuration

  • Relational database (MySQL or PostgreSQL) administrative configuration backend
  • Support for configuration database hosted on remote configuration server

Web Server

  • Upgraded to latest Apache 1.3.X release
  • OpenSSL and mod-ssl upgraded to latest versions
  • Removed default modules not used by Urchin
  • Added mod_expires for proper cache control headers

Task Scheduler

  • Scheduler now runs as two processes - master scheduler and slave scheduler
  • Tasks easily managed via scripting interface to back end configuration DB
  • More robust/reliable support for running multiple instances of slave scheduler on a single machines and/or in a cluster

Visitor Tracking

  • The old __utm.js tracking javascript has been replaced with a Google Analytics-compatible urchin.js tracking javascript (existing sites will need to upgrade)

Log Processing

  • Geodata stored in memory (larger runtime memory footprint)
  • Range of Days feature in log sources allows multi-day search for log files matching a particular date pattern
  • Ability to run profiles entirely in memory

Data & Storage

  • Profile databases now default to 100,000 records/month (instead of 10,000) with option to increase up to 500,000 records per month
  • Expanded Geodata: full set of geolocation data from Quova, replaces domain-only MaxMind data
  • Monthly table record limit increased from default of 10,000 to 100,000 records
  • 50 monthly files per profile, now organized by subdirectory

Reporting UI

  • Flash replaces Adobe SVG for rendering graphs & charts
  • Report exporting only in CSV and XML (removed unreliable MS Word/Excel exporting)
  • All Profiles report is defunct
  • New visitor session/path level reporting capabilities

Ecommerce

  • Ecommerce transactions can be written directly to webserver logs via special functions in the tracking javascript (identical to GA)
  • External shopping cart logs in ELF2 format also supported

Security

  • Urchin 6 has gone through a thorough quality assurance for cross-site scripting (XSS) and XSRF vulnerabilities