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Web Log Analyzers?

Posted by Cliff on from the making-sense-out-of-your-access_log dept.

sammy.lost-angel.com asks: "What's the best web log analyzer out there today? It's time to upgrade our horribly out of date one and I'm not sure what's good out there at this time. Our site receives about 50,000 hits a day, so things like remembering what's already been analyzed can save a lot of time." What about log analyzers that can work on more than one type of web server? An analyzer that could parse access data for, say, IIS and Apache would be a nice tool!

3 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. My 2 bits about 2 packages by azephrahel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well the two web log analyzers I worked with at my old job were,
    WebTrends Professional
    and WebSphere Site Analyzer.

    Bottom line with WebTrends is, its junk. It costs a bundle, is more expensive for the unix version, and you need one base liscence for the first machine who's logs you want to analyze, plus one supplimental liscence for each additional machine. If your site spans four boxes, you need a base+3 additonal. PRICEY! To boot it is not very configurable, and it has a hellova time counting user sessions by custom cookies.

    WebSphere SiteAnalyzer on the other hand is a behmoth of a program. It requires far to many resource to run, takes forever to properly configure, and needs a tweaked version of DB2. On the plus side its highly configurable, and comes "Free" with websphere server afaik. You can count anyting on anything if you really want to, and you don't need to get a special version to do your own querries against the data. All the data is in DB2, so you are free to probe the data all on your lonesome. With Webtrends you need a special version to get access to the database, and then the access is only with their propiretary libs. Of course the other big plus for SiteAnalyzer is that it has a client server model, and the both can run on Linux, Solaris, HPuX, windos..etc.

    To be honest those are the two biggies for comercial site analysis software, and neither are that good. Check out some of the OS offerings, prehaps one of them will work for you :)

    --
    You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
  2. Re:AWstats rocks! by damiam · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

    If you're going to quote someone, at least give them proper credit:
    "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  3. Re:What's it matter what server generates the logs by Stephen · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Last I checked, both IIS and Apache generate (or can be set to generate) W3C standard format logfiles. Part of the reason for having/using that standard is so that you don't get locked into a proprietary tool.
    You might think so, but IIS breaks the standard in several ways. And it's not even really a standard, just an early working draft that was never finished.

    In my opinion, a good logfile analysis tool should be able to recognise and analyse all commonly-used formats, and provide a means to specify custom formats. In other words, it should work with what the server has already produced, rather than force the server administrator to reconfigure the server and ignore old logfiles. My program analog does all this, but most programs don't.

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    11.00100100001111110110101010001000100001011010001 1000010001101001100010011