How does Urchin 6 differ from Urchin 5?

This article describes the changes between Urchin 5 and Urchin 6.

Major Features

• Unlimited profiles, log sources and campaign tracking all included with base license; no add-on modules
• 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 on par with Urchin 5 but with much richer data

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

Installers

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

Configuration

• Relational database (MySQL or PostgreSQL) 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

Visitor Tracking

• The Urchin 5 __utm.js tracking javascript has been replaced with a Google Analytics-compatible urchin.js tracking javascript. If you are tracking your site using __utm.js, you will need to change your site tags to use urchin.js.

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

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

• Thorough testing for cross-site scripting (XSS) and XSRF vulnerabilities