Free Web Statistics and Web Log Analyzers

Web log analysers (or "log analyzers" if you use American English) allow you to generate useful statistics about your website and your visitors from your raw web logs. Typically, they will present the web statistics in a graphical or tabular form - organising related data together to make it easier to get a picture of your site's performance. For example, you can use the statistics to understand how your visitors arrive at your site: which search engine sent them? Which keywords did they use to search? What browsers did they use? Or the generated report can be used to examine the traffic flow through your site - which are the entry pages? Which are your exit pages? It allows the web designer or webmaster the opportunity to fix problems with his/her site and understand the target audience. In my opinion, if you have access to raw logs (as most, if not all, commercial web hosts provide), web log analysers and statistics programs are far more useful than web counter Perl CGI scripts and the like.

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Free Web Statistics and Web Log Analyzers

Logrep - Log File Extraction and Reporting System

Logrep analyses and presents the data obtained from your various logs (including web logs, mail logs, event logs, intrusion logs, syslog files, etc) and generates statistics for your system. The reports are generated in an HTML page. The program supports Apache, Snort, Squid, Postfix, Sendmail, syslog, ipchains, iptables, NT event logs, Firewall-1, wtmp, xferlog, Oracle listener and Pix. It uses a client/server model (with secure SSH communication between client and server) and works under Linux and Windows. The source is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

AWStats Advanced Web Statistics

AWStats is a web server log analyzer that generates graphical statistics from your web logs. It can be run as a CGI script or from the command line to create the web stats. It has a large number of features, including the ability to count unique visitors, most popular page, domains/countries of visitors, rush hours, browsers, operating system used, robot visits, search engines, keywords used in search engines, HTTP errors (eg 404 File Not Found errors), etc. It can analyse Apache native combined log files, IIS log files, WebStar native log files, and personalised log formats. The program is actually a Perl script, and perhaps because of this, is rather slow. You can use this offline on your logs (such as on your own computer); it does not need to be run on your web server. If not for its speed (or lack thereof), I actually like this web stats software.

http-analyze: A Log Analyzer for Web Servers

The free version of this log analyzer is for non-commercial (private/educational) use only, and lags behind the commercial version by a few versions. Binaries are available for Irix, Solaris, Linux, System V 4.0 (i386), and Windows NT. It has numerous features and is installed by a number of commercial web hosts. I find that it is good for collating information, but lacks sufficient analysis of that information. For example, it will give you the list of all 404 errors. But it does not tell you the referring page that generated those 404 errors. (Okay, I know. Few, if any, log analyzers at the time of this writing do this anyway.)

Analog Log File Analyser

This is a popular free log analyser that is used on a number of web hosts, both free and commercial (probably because it's free). It appears to lack the facility to generate exhaustive reports like one of the other log analyzers listed on this page, but if you only want to take a look at say, the "top 30" (or whatever) of all the sites that referred visitors to your site, and not all of them, you'll be fine.

Webalizer Web Server Log File Analyzer

Written in C, this web log analyzer purports to be fast. Because it is integrated in a popular "control panel" used by many web hosts, it can be found on a number of commercial web hosts. Being free, it is also used by some free web hosts. It is popular with a number of people (I am not one of them) and provides a wide variety of reports. It appears to lack the facility to generate exhaustive reports like one of the other log analyzers listed on this page, but if you only want to take a look at say, the "top 250" (or whatever) of all the sites that referred visitors to your site, and not all of them, you'll be fine.

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Free Web Statistics and Web Log Analyzers