📌 Purpose & Quick Summary

The Traffic Analytics engine provides granular web intelligence and visitor telemetry across all domains hosted on your account. It parses real-time access logs directly from the Host Nginx edge proxy to display visitor volume, hit distribution, bandwidth consumption, HTTP response codes, and geographic origin. This data enables you to understand your audience, track marketing campaigns, and rapidly detect DDoS attacks or malicious scrapers.

BoostonCP User Traffic Analytics Overview

Figure 3: Interactive traffic analytics dashboard showing visitor trends, bandwidth utilization, and response code analytics.

🖥️ Interface Tour & Elements

  1. Timeframe Filter Controls: Toggle buttons allowing you to switch between Last 24 Hours, Last 7 Days, and Last 30 Days analytics windows.
  2. Domain Selector Dropdown: Allows filtering analytics for an individual domain or aggregating metrics across all account domains.
  3. Core Metric Summary Tiles:
    • Total Hits: The overall count of raw HTTP/HTTPS requests processed.
    • Unique Visitors: Distinct IP addresses identified during the selected timeframe.
    • Pageviews: Total HTML documents and rendered pages served to users.
    • Data Transfer: Exact gigabytes or megabytes of bandwidth consumed.
  4. Traffic Trend Chart: High-resolution timeline graph displaying request spikes, daily troughs, and peak traffic hours.
  5. HTTP Status Code Breakdown: Categorizes traffic into standard status families: 2xx Success, 3xx Redirection, 4xx Client Error (e.g. 404s), and 5xx Server Error (e.g. 500, 502, 503).
  6. Top Referrers & Geographic Distribution: Tables showing referring websites, search engines, and top countries of visitor origin.

🛠️ Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1: Navigating to Traffic Analytics

  1. In the sidebar menu, click Traffic Analytics (icon: fa-chart-pie).
  2. The dashboard loads your account's aggregate traffic data automatically.

Step 2: Filtering Data by Domain and Range

  1. Click the Domain dropdown at the top of the page and select the specific domain you wish to inspect (or leave as All Domains).
  2. Click 24H, 7D, or 30D to adjust the reporting timeframe.
  3. The charts and metric tiles will instantly re-render based on your selection.

Step 3: Investigating Traffic Anomalies

  1. Examine the HTTP Status Code Breakdown.
  2. If 4xx Errors are unusually high, visitors or bots are requesting missing files. Check your website internal links or investigate potential directory brute-force attempts.
  3. If 5xx Errors are elevated, check the Resource Check page to verify if PHP workers are being exhausted or database queries are timing out.

⚙️ Complete Field & Parameter Reference Table

Metric / Filter Available Options Technical Definition & Analysis
Timeframe Range 24 Hours, 7 Days, 30 Days Defines the rolling window used to aggregate access log events.
Domain Filter Domain list / All Domains Isolates metrics for a single VirtualHost or combines account-wide traffic.
Total Hits Numerical count Every single HTTP request received, including images, CSS, JS, and HTML.
Unique Visitors Distinct IP count Number of unique client IP addresses visiting your website within the period.
Pageviews Numerical count Requests specifically returning text/html MIME types (excluding static assets).
Bandwidth (MB/GB) Gigabytes / Megabytes Total payload egress sent over Port 80 and Port 443.
Status 200 OK Percentage / Count Standard successful HTTP response codes indicating healthy page delivery.
Status 404 Not Found Percentage / Count Missing asset or broken link requests. Elevated counts indicate crawling or attack scans.
Status 503 Service Unavailable Percentage / Count Indicates backend runtime throttling or maintenance mode activation.

❓ Troubleshooting & Common Errors

1. Analytics Display "No Traffic Data Available"

  • Cause: The selected domain is newly added and has not received HTTP/HTTPS traffic yet, or DNS has not fully propagated to the server.
  • Solution: Visit your website in a private browsing window to generate initial hits. Allow 5 minutes for the access log parser to aggregate and display the fresh telemetry.

2. Sudden Massive Spike in Bandwidth and Hits

  • Cause: Automated bot scrapers, brute force login attempts, or an ongoing layer 7 DDoS attack.
  • Solution: Navigate to Domains -> Manage -> Security & DDoS Protection. Turn on Under Attack Mode and set a Visitor Rate Limit to automatically challenge suspicious traffic.