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Statistical Analyzers for HTTP Logs?

Posted by Cliff on from the talk-about-lots-of-mining,-data dept.

krishnaD asks: "I have been using webalizer to generate access log reports for the site but lately my customers are asking for statistics like average amount of time spent by visitors on site, if a person reaches a page X, what is the probability that from here he goes to Y? From which link people exited the site etc. Basically, they are asking for a detailed flow analysis of usage patterns of visitors. Are there any tools that will do this kind of analysis? I love to know what kind of tools other sysadmins use to generate reports for their clients."

8 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Karma whore link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Freshmeat Internet::Log Analysis

    1. Re:Karma whore link by balamw · · Score: 2, Informative
      Of that bunch, I must say that I really like Webalizer. It produces really nice looking reports with pie and bar charts and the level of detail can be customized to almost any need. It's also nice that it'll work on both web server logs as well as squid logs....

      Analog may be the most poular, but I also found it rather difficult to set up and get useful data into and out of.

      Balam

  2. Urchin - cream of the crop by proxybyproxy · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have tried webalizer and webtrends, but without a doubt, nr. 1 is Urchin. It really is the cream of the crop, but it costs too. You check out a sample here.

    If you get an account with Verio, you will get your stats in Urchin for free.

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    Hurra for Knark!
    1. Re:Urchin - cream of the crop by demaria · · Score: 3, Informative

      Urchin is fast and awesome.

      But it doesn't have as much detail as other vendors like Webtrends. You can't really do campaign analysis.

      Review of these two

  3. More linkage by Dead+Penis+Bird · · Score: 3, Informative

    Access Analyzers (Uppsala University)

    Log Analyzers (reallybig.com)

    Web Log Analyzers (2K Communications)

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    If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!

  4. Re:WebTrends by jslag · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've used WebTrends for about a year, and couldn't be less impressed. Randomly chokes on logs that webalizer handles without trouble. Hard-to-use interface. Reports a number of things that you really can't tell from web logs.


    On the plus side, the PHBs love it.

  5. W3Perl by Jon+Peterson · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, if you are looking for free stuff...

    I'd recommend W3Perl http://www.w3perl.com/softs/index.html which is a kind of mess of perl scripts, but is surprisingly fast (much faster than other perl-only stats packages), and is the most full featured free package I've ever come across.

    Set up is kind of a pain - it's rather complex, owing to the vast array of configurable thingies, but it works pretty well once it's put together.

    There are some genuinely innovative features, such as a tree view of your website weighted by the popularity of each branch from /index.html

    Worth a look if you are on a feature hunt. It requires some arcane image generation program to make the pretty graphs.

    Oh, and if you were hoping to explore the code - be aware that the guy who wrote it is French :-)

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  6. Re:Not difficult by fdragon · · Score: 5, Informative

    But you cannot tie a particular IP address to a user. You have the problems of AOL users (each request from a different IP address) and corporations (and now many homes) using NAT or PAT devices to make 1 or more users have the same IP address.

    The best way to get around this is setting a session cookie via Apache. Then you key off that.

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    The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.