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Log Analysis Tools for Windows?
FunkMonkey asks: "I administer a custom web app for my company (unfortunately, it's a Windows-only company -- servers and all), and I've been asked to find a web log analysis tool that our users can use to look at standard stats (number of visits/hits, etc.), as well as the ability to filter by authenticated users (including putting those users into groups). Additionally, the tool must be free or under $100.00, and be able to generate Excel (or Excel-compatible) reports. My app generates ECLF reports, so just about any web log analyzer should be able to read the logs themselves. I see this as a good opportunity to weasel some Open-Source stuff into the company. Any help you can offer -- suggesting apps, tips, forums to which I could post this question, etc. -- would be most welcome. Thanks in advance!"
www.analog.cx
First of all; he already has logs. He asked about log analysis, not log creation. If you mean to insert a custom php function into every file dologline() or something, that would be a) slow, b) hard-to-impossible to implement on potentially thousands of files c) incompatable if he is using any other server generated pages. And it would miss static objects, images for example.
If you mean, write your own log parser in PHP, again that would be both slow and painfull. PHP isnt paticularly good at text manipulation (which is ironic, seeing as how thats what html generation basicly is). And even if it was as good (or better then), say Perl, Perl has massive amounts of free modules avialable desigined for log analysis, statistics, report generation. PHP is lacking in the third party lib field.
I dont know the state of Activestate (*cough*) so I dont know how well existing, built for Unix, Perl log analysis packages would work. I suspect that many just would. To which, I point out a freshmeat link.
FYI - many web applications that export to a .xls file, are simply creating an HTML document, (hopefully with tables in it), and changing the header so the browser does not think the file is text/html.
eg:
Response.ContentType = "mime-type application/vnd.ms-excel"
Response.AddHeader "content-disposition", "attachment; filename=auto-gen.xls"
You can also do the same to generate M$ Word files - although they dont need a table inside. These files can be opened in M$ Office and OpenOffice.
Mike
I use AWStats on a home web server.
It's written entirely in perl so it can work on Windows just fine as well. To see a sample go here.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Consider using Microsoft's Log Parser 2.x (2.1 Included in IIS 6.0, 2.0 availible as Download for Win2k/XP/2k3, and is only 2mb.
.xls files, but it does let you run SQL like queries against log files of any format. Its availible as command line and as a series of scriptable COM objects.
? di splaylang=en&familyid=8cde4028-e247-45be-bab9-ac85 1fc166a4
It doesn't output to
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
You can try some of these:
l
e rs.html
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/webtrax-help.htm
http://www.ftls.org/en/examples/cgi/ewla.shtml
http://www.watchwise.net/
http://www.weblogexpert.com/
For a detailed list of web log analyzers, go to this page. It has listing of various platform specific and platform independent analyzers:
http://www.uu.se/Software/Analyzers/Access-analyz
Absolute log analyzer. exports to excel and many other things. Pro version is $250 but looks to be quite flexible.
*cragen.