Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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 It's time to upgrade our horribly out of date one and I'm not sure what's good out there at this time.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!

2 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Analog by Stephen · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'd like to plug analog. I'm the author, so read my comments in that light. :-)

    First, as others have commented, the commercial programs suck, especially Webtrends.

    Analog is over six years old, but it's still actively developed, and I think it's still the leading free log analyser. The main contender is the Webalizer. To some extent it depends what you want (why not try out both?). The Webalizer's biggest advantage is that it produces prettier pictures. Some of analog's advantages are that it is more configurable; that it runs on any OS (the Webalizer is Unix only); and that it can analyse logfiles from any web server.

    Besides, analog's author reads Slashdot.

    --
    11.00100100001111110110101010001000100001011010001 1000010001101001100010011
    1. Re:Analog by frankie · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I use Analog exclusively (well, after DNSTran for name lookups and Perl to sort out sub-logs) and I have found little reason to complain. As Stephen mentioned, you can use ReportMagic to prettify the output. I don't bother.

      My only complaint is Stephen's dogmatic insistence on not performing any form of speculative analysis. For example, he refuses to even attempt visitor counting, path tracking, etc. The sort of stuff that bosses like to see, whether or not it's strictly accurate.

      Stephen could put WebTrends out of business with a couple hours of coding, but he has his principles.