AWStats makes sense of web server logs

Do you ever dig through logs? If you’re reading this post, you probably do. Logs at almost any application level are key to solving many problems. Without tools that bring them to life, they’d just be a dull pile of data.

I spent the past six days preparing, collecting and evaluating application logs.
The AWStats log analyzer proved invaluable.
I used it on logs from IIS, but it can do more than that. It can handle Apache logs, logs in NCSA format and many others.

It’s essentially a set of Perl scripts that work magic on logs. The most basic information can be
presented as an HTML page, for example (see the sample output from the project site’s own logs). There are traffic statistics by hour, day, month and year, page views,
data transferred, user agents, HTTP status codes, search engine referrals, average time on pages
and a lot of other information that can come in handy when analyzing traffic.

Services such as navrcholu.cz and toplist.cz offer only a pale imitation of what
AWStats presents. You can also run AWStats as a CGI application to view statistics directly in your browser.
It’s easy to install and localized into Czech. The cherry on top is that it’s free software, distributed under a GNU license.

If you’re looking for a log analyzer, I highly recommend AWStats. For IIS users
I’d add that Microsoft’s own Log Parser 2.0 has also worked well for me. It
lets you use SQL to get data from the logs.