How to determine number of unique users accessing Confluence via annonymous access?

[Lucy Corral]

We have a Confluence instance that allows anonymous access by default. The instance is accessible only from the intranet.  I'd like to determine the number of unique users accessing the Wiki via anonymous access.

Icing on the cake would be if I could determine other user statistics, such to the last time a given anonymous access viewed a page and which pages where viewed.

In summary I'd like to answer the following questions

1. How many people are using anonymous access to view Wiki
2. What pages are those people viewing
3. How often they use this access.

Any ideas are most appreciated

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

You can't do it in full.  The best you can do is run Confluence behind a proxy with the user logging enabled, so that you can capture people hitting pages, but you simply can't identify people from it.  You can get some from a session (if a particular session id is used repeatedly, you can be pretty sure it's the same person), but each new session is different, and you'd mostly be guessing.  I could visit today from home, tomorrow from work and then the day after from home again (I have a dynamic IP, so I'd look as though I was elsewhere), with different sessions, and possibly with different browsers.  You would struggle to id me.  That's the point of anonymous - you don't.

You will be able to get the page urls and volume of hits on each over time from it though.

[Lucy Corral]

Thanks Nic.  I was afraid that would be the case.  

Analyzing one of the access logs turn 338 unique IPs.  Those are the IPs that have accessed Wiki since Sunday morning.  Several of those IPs don't resolve to anything in DNS making tracking them nearly impossible.