Analyzing Your Personal Log Files
Summary
This article introduces tools and techniques you can use to analyze your personal log files. It also describes how to produce customized analyses by pre-filtering the data in your log files. You should familiarize yourself with the Personal Log File Service before reading this article.
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Introduction
The Personal Log File Service delivers raw log file data to your personal log files. Unless you're very patient, you'll find this data difficult to read and understand. That's where log file analysis begins. Tools exist to help you analyze and summarize your log files. UW Technology provides limited support for two such tools, wwwstat and refstats, which are described in this article.
Before you can use any log file analysis tools you need some log file data. Our article on the Personal Log File Service describes how to turn on your log files and start accruing data.
Using wwwstat (access_log)
The wwwstat program takes access_log data as input and creates a summary of this data as output. If you capture the output in a file and place the file in your Web directory, you can view it using a Web browser.
To use the wwwstat command, first log in to the Web development environment. At the shell prompt, enter the following commands to summarize all the data in your current access_log file:
cd public_html
wwwstat access_log > stats.html
The first command moves you into your Web directory. The second command runs the wwwstat program, specifying your access_log file as input, and directs output into a file called stats.html. Since the stats.html file is created in your Web directory, it can be opened with a Web browser, just like any other file in your Web directory.
Run the wwwstat command any time you want to summarize the data in your current access_log file and create an up-to-date summary. Although the personal log file service delivers data every night, you have run the wwwstat command each time you want to generate a report. Depending on how often you want to review the activity of your Web site, you might run the wwwstat command once a week or on the first day of each month.
To learn more about wwwstat enter wwwstat -h or refer to the wwwstat home page.