Documentation

There’s nothing that vexes first-time users of JoomlaWatch (and website hosting in general) than the idea of database sizes. But if you’re using JoomlaWatch (and reading through our tutorials), you’ll probably recognize that database information really isn’t as complicated as it might seem. In fact, it’s simply a measurement of the forms and databases you’re already putting on your website.

It’s important to measure these databases for a number of reasons. The first is load time – you don’t want a database getting so large that it ends up affecting the load time of your website. The second is spam attacks. Databases are often “hack points” for spammers to infiltrate your site and post some of their spam links.
As you’ll see, when using JoomlaWatch, you likely won’t have to worry about these scenarios. One of the reasons you won’t have to worry is the Database Status page, which we’ll now explore in further detail.

Overview

Opening up the Database Status function on JoomlaWatch is exceptionally easy. Either use this handy feature at the top of all of your JoomlaWatch functions:

…or you can open it up under the top menu by clicking Components -> JoomlaWatch -> Database Status. Not too hard to remember.
Once you’ve mastered this particular maneuver, you’ll be able to access the main Database Status page. You’ll find something that looks like this:

It might seem like a lot of information to digest at first, but let’s take a closer look and explore what each column really means.
The first column, Table, is really self-explanatory: it gives the name of the database table that’s being measured.

The second column, Records, is not one that you’ll particularly have to worry about, as it corresponds to the values present in the database table itself.
The third column, Size, can be an important one to keep an eye on. It’s measured in information size, so the larger the database table, the more “space” it’s taking up on your website. As you can see in the example above, all of the database tables are relatively small and shouldn’t be causing any problems anywhere.
The next three tables deal with the changes in the database tables. Because there’s “no data” being kept for these database tables, we really shouldn’t be concerned with those, as there’s no real report to generate.

Then there’s the seventh column, which is unnamed. There you can see the icon that looks like a graph. Let’s explore this option a little further.

Using the Graph Icon

Whenever you see an icon like this associated with a row of information in JoomlaWatch, it’s generally an invitation for you to interact further. In this case, that’s exactly what it is.

In fact, if you’ve been using your JoomlaWatch features already, you’ll probably notice that this icon looks a little similar. That’s because it serves a similar function as you’ve seen in other features. Here’s what happens when you click it:

As is the case in the Live Stats feature, clicking on the graph icon brings you – what else? – a graph to look at. In this case, you can review the statistics of each individual database table as it relates to previous days.

As you can see, when you leave your databases alone (like we have), you’ll find that there isn’t a whole lot of information to be gleamed from this function. But if you ever do find yourself wanting to review the status of a certain database table, be sure to click on the graph icon to bring up more individual information about that database.
You can print off this report for further reference, of course, by clicking on the Printer icon in the upper-right hand side of the graph. Or you can simply close the window and continue reviewing your database status information.

Database Table Sizes

Scrolling down (which actually takes a while for us, as we have a lot of database tables listed), you’ll come to the next section of measurement which relates to the database table sizes. Again, reviewing these sizes can be crucially important to maintaining a site that does not occupy a lot of space.
Here’s what our table looks like:

This table is more straightforward than the one you saw above, but it’s still worth exploring exactly what’s going on here.
Here you can see the sizes of individual tables. These aren’t actually sorted by size, but alphabetically based on the name of the database table on the left. From there, you can view the rows of the database table, the presence of which strongly coincide with the raw data amount on the right-hand side of the table. You can see that jos_joomlawatch_uri is the table that’s not only occupying the most space, but is actually representing a majority of the total information present (at approximately 13 mb out of 22 mb).

Conclusion

There is a low level of interaction when it comes to using the Database Status page. Essentially, this page is generated for you to review your databases and not make many changes. Although you can tinker around a little bit and review the individual graphs for each database table, the function of Database Status is to inform you in the form of a list. In many cases, this is exactly all you need.

If you need to find a particular table, we simply suggest employing “Control + F” and typing in the name of the database table you want to review. Each chart is text-based which will allow for this easy type of searching.

While most of what we’ve covered thus far deals with the more live functions of JoomlaWatch’s traffic reporting features, let’s not forget that convenient summaries are one enticing piece of the puzzle. That’s what you’ll get in the case of email reports, a fully customizable feature of JoomlaWatch that you’ll want to configure to your own settings and likings. Let’s take a look at this configurations and features so you can customize your own email reporting experience with JoomlaWatch.

Overview

Open up “Emails” under the top bar or go to Components -> JoomlaWatch -> Email Reports to bring up the same page we’ll be dealing with here. You should see a table that looks a little something like this:



This is the top of the Email Reports page, and as you can see, a lot of configurations and settings are built right in. First, let’s take a look at the “Email Reports” tables and see what you can customize through those settings.

Email Reports

Since the name of the page is, after all, Email Reports, it only stands to reason that the first thing you’ll configure is how you deal with your email reports. Here is where you can change some of the most central options to the Email Reports features:



On the top, you’ll see a simple checkmark for enabling nightly emails with reports from the previous day. As you can see here, we have ours enabled, but if you don’t want to receive reports that often, you can simply leave this box unchecked.

Below that option, you can fill in the email address at which you want to receive these reports – nothing out-of-the-ordinary to report here.
Next, you see the EMAIL_NAME_TRUNCATE option. This is simply an option that allows you to change the maximum characters of the email row name; this comes in handy if your individual email program has limited options and you need to configure the email itself.

Email Value Filters

The next section of settings and features allows you to change the values of reports in the email itself. Essentially, you are whittling down the information you receive in each email report by telling Email Reports when to exclude certain information. Let’s take a look:

In each function, you’re entering in the value (generally a percentage, though you don’t want to include the actual percentage sign) that configures the rows and traffic reports you’ll see in the email.

Note that setting this value to 0 simply deactivates the individual information, taking it out of the report email. We have a number of these settings already set to “0” when it comes to these email value filters.

If you want to receive other information (relating to SEO) as opposed to the basic traffic information of your site, you can enable the SEO night email reports by toggling the box underneath “Email Value Filters”:

Also, be sure to hit “Save” after you make any changes so that your changes to the email report function will actually take effect.

A Glimpse of What to expect

Okay, so are all the boxes you’ve already seen a little confusing? If that’s the case, we can take a look at information from a sample report to let you know what you can expect to see in your email reports. (Note: you’ll see a sample of your own when you log in to Email Reports and scroll to the bottom of the page.)
Here’s what you’ll see upon first looking at the “generated filtered email report from yesterday”:

This basic information – unique hits, loads, and overall ll hits – includes information such as the 1-day change from the previous day, the weekly change, and a 28-day change that essentially correlates with a monthly change.

If you’re regularly logging in to your JoomlaWatch, there’s a good chance that you already know these basic numbers. Even so, the Email Report can function as a great “summary” at the end of the day that gives you the actual context of the entire day.
From there, your email report will feature statistics that strongly correlate to what you’re able to browse regularly on JoomlaWatch:

As you can see, the report automatically sorts each of the variables by their popularity. As you can see, the page “user/register” was the most popular page of the day for the current report. Not only is the value of how many times the page was hit displayed, but the overall percentage of how valuable this page to your website is located immediately to the right. This is similar for “Referers” and “Keyphrases” as well – all of the numbers you’re looking at essentially mean the same thing.
It’s important to note right now that these variables will look different as you edit your email report settings, which we discussed earlier. You can exclude certain pages from these reports if you don’t need to review their information on a regular basis.

Let’s continue exploring.

As you can see, the variables that are measured in the daily report strongly correspond to the variables you can check on your own, such as in the Graphs and Trends function of JoomlaWatch. Viewing this generated report at Email Reports is actually a good way to get a daily summary of the traffic you received if you don’t actually want to receive nightly emails.
There are more variables that are measured here too, including Users, Browsers, and Operating Systems. But since you probably get the gist of what Email Report numbers are all about, we didn’t include those in the screenshots.

Conclusion

Configuring your email report options is a pretty straightforward process. How your email reports ultimately end up looking is up to you and your preferences; if you want to see a total range of everything going on your site, you can configure each variable to include up to 100 percent. But give it some time to whittle down the statistics you truly want to see in your email inbox every night; you might just find out that you use JoomlaWatch’s other features enough to justify not even receiving email reports every night. Through customization, the choice is up to you.