Re: Tools for analysing web statistics.

[John <john@keimel.com>]

On Mon, Dec 23, 2002 at 02:22:14PM +0000, Fred Clausen wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I would like to know what your experiences are with analysing web logs. I
> am currently testing Webalizer and Lire but if anyone has any others they
> could recommend then I would be interested in hearing your experiences.
> 
> We currently host multiple sites using the apache mod_vhost_alias module.
> I then use a perl script to split the main access log into access logs for
> each site. After that I have written a shell script to run webalizer on
> each access log for the individual sites, I am busy figuring out Lire and
> would like to try that with lire. Lire can generate pdf docs (amongst
> others) as well so that makes it attractive.

Why not use apache to make your logs be seperate? 

VirtualHost directives can do that..... for example:

<VirtualHost 209.61.212.13>
ServerName john.adsp.net
ServerAdmin john@adsp.net
DocumentRoot /var/www/john
ErrorLog /var/log/apache/john.adsp.net-error.log
CustomLog       /var/log/apache/john.adsp.net-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Which produces a log just for my virtual host on a special place, then
you can have webalizer (or whatever tool) run on each log on it's own.
The load on webalizer has never been that great for our purposes and
running it in maintenance window periods has always worked fine for me. 

This has the added benefit of allowing the customer to see THEIR raw
logs anyyime they want. If you're particularly BOFHish, you can also
then include the raw logs as part of their specified allowed space,
therefore accounting for more of your disk space. 

We use this where I work and it works nicely. It stops customer requests
for logs (well, stops us having to do any work to get them ;) and allows
us to keep many smaller log files instead of one big huge one. 

HTH

j