Log Analysis Tools for Windows? 37
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 $100.00, and be able to generate Excel (or Excel-compatible) reports. My app generates ECLF reports, so just about any web log analyzer should be able to read the logs themselves. I see this as a good opportunity to weasel some Open-Source stuff into the company. Any help you can offer -- suggesting apps, tips, forums to which I could post this question, etc. -- would be most welcome. Thanks in advance!"
Analog (Score:4, Informative)
Re:PHP (Score:2, Informative)
First of all; he already has logs. He asked about log analysis, not log creation. If you mean to insert a custom php function into every file dologline() or something, that would be a) slow, b) hard-to-impossible to implement on potentially thousands of files c) incompatable if he is using any other server generated pages. And it would miss static objects, images for example.
If you mean, write your own log parser in PHP, again that would be both slow and painfull. PHP isnt paticularly good at text manipulation (which is ironic, seeing as how thats what html generation basicly is). And even if it was as good (or better then), say Perl, Perl has massive amounts of free modules avialable desigined for log analysis, statistics, report generation. PHP is lacking in the third party lib field.
I dont know the state of Activestate (*cough*) so I dont know how well existing, built for Unix, Perl log analysis packages would work. I suspect that many just would. To which, I point out a freshmeat [freshmeat.net] link.
Excel (Score:4, Informative)
eg:
Response.ContentType = "mime-type application/vnd.ms-excel"
Response.AddHeader "content-disposition", "attachment; filename=auto-gen.xls"
You can also do the same to generate M$ Word files - although they dont need a table inside. These files can be opened in M$ Office and OpenOffice.
Mike
awstats (Score:3, Informative)
It's written entirely in perl so it can work on Windows just fine as well. To see a sample go here [homeftp.net].
A Microsoft tool for a Microsoft job? (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't output to
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx
Re:Analog (Score:3, Informative)
Some of these (Score:5, Informative)
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
Absoulte (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Analog (Score:4, Informative)
So I took a look at AWStats and (although slower - it's written in perl not compiled c) it looks to have a lot more useful features.
Usefully though, I came across this comparison chart [sourceforge.net] comparing these three options plus another. Hope this helps.
bjpirt
WUSAGE is the best, I think... (Score:2, Informative)
*cragen.