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Which Web Statistics Package Would You Use?
ken-doh asks: "We host about 200 customers web sites on a Windows platform, we want to provide them with a simple web statistics package, to track hits and other useful pieces of information. We have been using Deepmetrix LiveStats XSP which has been perfect for our customers, but since Microsoft purchased it, the product is no more, with support ending next year. So we need to buy a new stats package. Any ideas?"
I'd choose awstats. It's fast, very easy to use, looks pretty, and best of all ... it's free to use on Windows as well as Linux. Here is their main page on sourceforge, which also includes a nice little demo.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Avoid SmarterStats. In fact, avoid the entire SmarterTools suite of products at all costs. Buggy. Poorly designed. Horrible!
If it ain't broke keep using it ;)
or is that not an option for some reason?
-nB
You missed something:
" Microsoft purchased it, the product is no more, with support ending next year."
Google Analytics is a little more sophisticated tool that requires you to embed a little bit of their code on every one of your pages. Also free to use.
For totally custom reporting, move your log data to the database following the guide I wrote earlier this year.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
The 1M page view limitation was for beta only. The current product has no limits.
Google Analytics is a good solution if you are looking for tracking based on javascript / web bug images.
Since they are looking for something that works off the server log files (such as LiveStats) maybe they should look at Urchin which runs locally and processes the log files. Google purchased Urchin to make their Analytics offering. Unlike Microsoft and LiveStats, however, Google still sells and supports the Urchin software through retail partners.
Pricing is fairly reasonable, and is based on log sources and websites monitored. $895 buys you 100 profiles with one log source each. $695 extra per additional log source (i.e. if you've got 3 servers serving one website you'd need 2 additional log sources) regardless of the number of profiles. $695 extra per 100 additional profiles, as well.
They also offer campaign tracking and ecommerce reporting modules.
One thing that's impressed me about the program is the speed. We're using it on 150 profiles (with a maximum of 6 log sources per profile, though only one profile actually uses that many. Most of our profiles use only one log source) and it takes about 8 hours to process the logs each day from a central box using smb/cifs to pull the data files.
I'm not sure if you're trying to point out how useless webstats can be, but generally speaking most stats software I've worked with count a "visit" as an ip that it hasn't seen for the last 30 (sometimes configurable) minutes. If it sees it more than 30 minutes later, it's a new visit. If it sees an IP hitting the site within a 30 minute window, the hit counter gets bumped but the visit counter doesn't.
Awstats seems to be the modern usual answer (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/), used and recommended by many admins and groups (in my case EGEE, European Science Grid intiative http://www.eu-egee.org/) but for traditionalists with no eye-candy desires, there is a copy of Webalizer (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) lurking on most servers and almost all destribution package repositories. It's worth looking at the wikipedia page for specials, extended verions and general info on web server statistics and analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer.
Particularly, Stone Steps Webalizer is an interesting version of feature-full and candy-enabled version: http://www.stonesteps.ca/projects/webalizer/. Others can be easily found on Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=webalizer§ion=p rojects (i.e. Webalizer Extended with included Geolizer and extensive 404 analysis support, http://www.patrickfrei.ch/webalizer/ and AwFull with usability, CSS and geo-ip features, http://www.stedee.id.au/awffull etc.).
Others can be found on Freshmeat (117 hits at this time http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=web&trove_cat_id=24 5§ion=trove_cat) and Wikipedia (very short and poor stub of a list that you might want to improve after your extensive testing :-) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_ana lytics_software.
There is also Sherlog, an Apache Log Analyser, specialized in user experinece tracking more than statistcs - an interesting complimentary tool (http://sherlog.europeanservers.net/.
-Kvorg
In a manner of speaking, yes. I'm guessing they're using the hosted version of Livestats, so if they stop support, they are probably also taking down the hosted servers. The full non-hosted version is substantially more expensive (but cheaper if you do millions of hits a day like we do here).
Slay a dragon... over lunch!