Thursday, April 24, 2008

Calling McLean, Va.: Is there a tech in the house?

My analytics software is showing a sharp increase in traffic from Maryland and a somewhat comparable decrease in traffic from Virginia. Have you guys done something with the network in the past two weeks that would explain that?

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8 comments:

  1. Just a guess, but they're Corporate may have started directing their traffic our of the Maryland Operations Center.

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  2. Yes. The traffic is being directed out of the Maryland Operations Center. That's where most of the AS400s are being consolidated into, and all of the Email servers are now being hosted.

    The Phoenix Operations Center serves the West Coast and the two operation centers act as redundant backups for each other.

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  3. Yeah, the tubes must have been redirected to the MOC. It sure was hard changing all those tubes around.

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  4. Maybe Gracia started working out of the MOC?

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  5. Jim, I would suggest a simple answer is best. It may have nothing to do with anything happening inside of Gannett and may have everything to do with how a network IP is being classified by your analytic tool.

    I think it's safe to assume that Google Analytics is a very rough estimate of where traffic is being generated from and putting too much reliance on it to define your readership demographics would be unwise.

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  6. I use three analytics services; can you recommend a better one? (The other two are Site Meter and StatCounter.)

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  7. Actually, all internet traffic for the corporate Metropolitan Area Network hits the internet via a "carrier hotel" that sits on the fiber ring that connects Tysons and the MOC. There aren't direct connections out of the MOC or Tysons that desktop users surf over.

    Additionally, outbound web surfing is proxied by a set of firewalls. Basically, to the internet, everyone at the MOC and Tysons essentially appears to be one of a few different TCP/IP addresses.

    That being said, your blog has become popular with more and more folks at corporate - I suspect as the numbers increase, you're starting to get folks who live in Maryland.

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  8. I seriously doubt if there is an equally weighted change in who is (no pun intended for the geeks out there) reading this blog between VA and MD. I'm sure that Gannett has multiple ISPs in the carrier hotel. I suspect that traffic between the ISPs is considered to be from different states based on how it is being routed to Google.

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