This article was first written in August 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/157).
AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically.
This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and displays all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. This graphical interface is pretty straightforward to use and pretty clear.
It uses a partial information file in order to process large log files, often and quickly.
It can analyze log files from IIS (W3C log format), Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar and most of all web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers (and some ftp).
The main uses of AWStats are generally
- to give an idea of one's website's traffic, and occasionally compare to external audition websites results
- to check for unauthorized accesses
- to check for 404 errors (pages asked by users that do not exist (anymore) on the webserver)
Please refer to the
AWStats documentation for more information.
Incidentally, we happen to have a distant working relationship with the highly-skilled author of AWStats, Laurent Destailleurs, through our common project Dolibarr.
