Slashdot Mirror

Sawmill. It ain't free (Speech nor Beer), but neither is Google Analytics. If you put a price on your users' privacy, anyways.
Also, it's a bit more techie-oriented than GA, a bit more faster and quite a bit more powerful. In the end, it's a matter of taste - I like it.

... and in the meantime I can really recommend Sawmill which I finde quite loveable as a log processor.

Sawmill is an excellent package. It's easy to configure, has nice drill-down features and great reporting. I'm not associated with the vendor, just a satisfied user.

I'll second Sawmill. While I haven't upgraded in a while, I find their pricing to be at least somewhat reasonable (as opposed to WebTrends). Even for a small business with multiple domains, you're only going to pay a few hundred bucks. (Pricing)

Sawmill also did a good job of analyzing our load-balanced set of web servers (allowing us to roll-up a set of combined stats).

I'll second Sawmill. While I haven't upgraded in a while, I find their pricing to be at least somewhat reasonable (as opposed to WebTrends). Even for a small business with multiple domains, you're only going to pay a few hundred bucks. (Pricing)

Sawmill also did a good job of analyzing our load-balanced set of web servers (allowing us to roll-up a set of combined stats).

BTW, they have an online demo. Play with it... I think it's pretty impressive.

Sawmill is an awesome slicer-and-dicer of your web logs. I haven't done web stuff in several years, but the package was awesome five years ago, and it looks like they've been refining the product over the years.

The requirement from the IT department was that it had to be able to do a two-pass analysis. The first pass to read all the raw data into a raw database, and the second one to filter through all of that (IE, hits from within the company and from search bots were discarded) and to generate the reports. The reason for that was that we didn't have room on our servers to store 20 megs of log files a day, and if we suddenly discovered that a certain IP address that had been registering all kinds of hits was actually a searchbot, we'd want to be able to rebuild the database without having to go back to the origional log files. At any rate, I spent a solid week on nothing but this, and here is what I found:

1) Webtrends - We already use this one. We don't like it as much because it doesn't track the clicks through the JSP post commands as well as we would like it to. If your company uses HTML pages, then it has a great ability to track users through your site. like what percentage of people who were on the main page clicked on this link, etc. etc. It only uses a one-pass database, so whenever we discover that a certain IP is a searchbot or we need to put on some other filter, we ahve to have someone go through hordes of data and clean it up a bit. It also has a web interface, so you can just dedicate an NT box (Mod: -1, Suggested Using Microsoft) to hosting the server and analyzing the data, and not have to dedicate anything else to it.

2) Nettracker by sane solutions: This is the best that I was able to find. It also has the web interface, and I was able to run the MySQL server, the nettracker server, and the web browser. It has a one-pass system also, but because it uses a simpler database structure than webtrends, it's easier to maintain the data. You can either use an oracle database, an SQL database, or it's own internal database. It also has the ability to track users through your website. It can export the reports through Microsoft Word or Excel (marketing people love that). It also has the ability to create custom reports easily, so that we don't have to custom make them for the marketing people.

3) The last one is sawmill. This has all the basic features that nettracker had, but can only use its own database, and as far as i could tell couldn't export the graphs. I will say, though, that it costs several orders of magnitue less than nettracker or the full version of webtrends does.

this is my analysis of web traffic analysis tools. Most of it is more than a month old, and comes from the demos that I could get at the time. If you think that I got something wrong, please post. Hope this helps a bit

If you don't mind paying for such a program, I would recommend Sawmill for this task.

It's not free, but it is very nice.

Jeremy

A couple of years ago, I did some research for webstats packages for our websites, and came up with a package that I haven't seen mentioned yet: Sawmill is the best tool for the kinds of questions you mentioned -- it can run as a CGI program (or as its own daemon) and does on-the-fly limiting, different reports, etc. So if they want to know what kind of browsers people were using in the Support section at 3am, they can get that.

I put together a Perl CGI to handle combining logs from all of our different servers, and then feed the combined log to Sawmill (or FunnelWeb, the other package we wound up using).

-Esme