WhosOn Editor's Review

WhosOn is an advanced tool for tracking your website's visitors. You can view their activity, the pages they visit, and other miscellaneous statistics about them. All this information is displayed in real-time, and is refreshed every couple of seconds.

A nice feature of this software allows you to chat with your visitors. Among other things, this software provides a detailed analysis of your website's status, error alerts, and logging abilities. The information is displayed using tabs. After you select the monitored website, you can view the number of current human visitors or spiders that access the site.

There are two ways of defining a new website which is to be monitored. The simplest way, in my opinion, is to select the path to your web server's acccess logs. WhosOn repeatedly reads these logs, providing you with the information you need. However, this is only recommended if you run WhosOn on the computer that acts as a webserver. Otherwise, downloading the logged data may take a long time. The second way to monitor a website is by using an embedded javascript in all of your web pages. If you choose this method, the information about your visitors is saved on a special computer, powered by WhosOn (WhosOn Gateway).

The application supports monitoring both IIS and Apache web servers. It can even be configured to serve separate web pages, which contain statistical data.

Pluses: This package contains in fact two applications. One does the actual information gathering and analysis (server), while the other (client) allows you to access this data remotely. I also have to say that even though lots of features are provided, the publisher did a great job in keeping the user interface as simple as possible.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: It's clear that a lot of work has been put into this application. If you need a way of monitoring your site's visitors, I recommend you try WhosOn.

version reviewed: 4.3.373