The Analog Web Log Analyzer

Version 5.90beta1 of Analog, a web server log analysis program has been announced. This version is the first beta release leading up to version 6. "The output functions have been completely rewritten, to allow new output styles to be added; there are two new output styles as a result, XHTML and XML; and the default style is now XHTML, instead of HTML." Version 5.90beta1 also includes new documentation.

This introduction is a good place to get an overview of how Analog works to mine information from an Apache web server log file. Analog is cross-platform, configurable, scalable, and open-source. It currently supports 31 languages. Analog also works with a number of helper applications.

To get an idea of what Analog can do, take a look at this example report. The developer claims that Analog is the most popular logfile analyser in the world.

A report can contain the following sections:

• A general summary of activity.
• A monthly bar-chart report.
• A daily bar-chart summary.
• A bar-chart summary of hourly activity.
• A domain report that shows where traffic is coming from.
• An organization report that lists the most active viewer domains.
• A report of the most common search terms.
• A listing of operating systems used by site visitors.
• A web server status code listing.
• Reports for file sizes and extensions.
• A report that shows traffic to served directories.
• A request report that lists served files.

By reading through this condensed information, it is possible to get a good idea of the traffic patterns at your web site. This helps in deciding which sections are worth the most effort to optimize.

One feature that is apparently not part of Analog is the ability to analyze the web server's error log file, a fair amount of useful information could be obtained that way. Analog is available for download here.

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