Analog

How do Business Developers take decisions on what should they be targeting at? Well, I think they too need data. But, data like what? Lets say you have a web site then they would like to know what interests people the most in your site. How do they figure out this? They are not oracles that would look at the crystal ball and say “Look these are the most visited site on our site and hence developing these products/pages further would increase the traffic and your revenue”. Obviously they would like that kind of data from the person who manages the web site.

Whenever there is a hit to your website, the web server that you use silently logs the request and the response it has sent. But what use is it of? I thought you would never ask this question after reading the first paragraph above. Okay, since you have asked this anyway, let me answer that. This would help that poor guy who has to give the demographics of the site to the enthusiast business developers. But any decent web site would have hits to a volume of few thousands a day. How do we get demographics from thousands of requests? This is where web log analyzers come to our rescue. I have been looking at few web log analyzers recently. Being strong supporter of open source software, I have tried to search for few and I came across this tool named Analog. An open source product, you can download from here. What was impressive was that it took me less than 5 minutes to get the whole stats from my web logs. Just under 5 minutes!!

This is what I did:

Downloaded the package from here
Unzipped it to my disk
Got into unzipped directory located analog.cfg fle, opened it and pointed the web log file.
Saved the config file, and ran the analog executable.
That’s it. This created the Report.html file that contained the stats.

Sounds good. But if you have a web site, which has huge traffic, there would whole lot of web logs created in a single day. How do we deal with this? Simple.. Zip up all the logs, point Analog to the zipped up file and run it. Analog will take care of reading the requests from archive file and present the stats for you.

More documentation is available here