Everyone wants something different from our web server. Marketeers want to know the geographical areas that hits are coming from. Editors want to know what content readers find most interesting.
Advertisers demand to know how many times their banner ads are delivered, and from what pages.
And of course, as system administrator, I need to know that pages are being delivered promptly. I can't get that information from conventional web server log files. Instead, I need a system that can periodically load-test pages from each of my servers, and log how long it takes. By graphing that data, I can get a feel for how well my servers are running. For the last year, I have been using a free software package, Cricket, that's perfect for this application.