AWStats Web Log Analyzer: Simple, Uncomplicated and Easy to Install
AWStats, or Advanced Web Statistics, is a free web log analyzer available at http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. AWStats produces impressive statistical analysis of log files, as you can see from their demo site.
Installing AWStats is quite simple, and can be accomplished in under ten minutes in Mac OS X Server. The configuration file format is explained in great detail in both the HTML documentation and within the default configuration file itself. Because AWStats is installed under the /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/ directory, it is accessible to all virtual hosts on your Server—and as an added plus, the installation doesn’t require file ownership changes in order to run properly.
AWStats is also convenient to run. After you set up the configuration file, you run the program once from the command line to generate the initial statistics output. Subsequent executions can occur on the command line (making it perfect for daily execution from within a crontab) or they can be run directly from a user’s Web browser, so that statistics can be easily generated on the fly from any point on the Net. AWStats has security settings that control who and where the statistics can be generated, too.
AWStats excels at pulling information out from log files, though you will want to dump Apple’s anemic default log style and switch to the much more robust Apache “combined” log file format. Unfortunately, Apple have not provided any means of doing this within Server Admin, so you will have to manually modify the /etc/httpd/httpd_macosxserver.conf file and keep watch on its contents if you make any changes to active sites using Server Admin in future. You’ll also want to disable the Performance Cache on all sites run off your Server, because Performance Cache further limits the accuracy and value of information stored in the site logs.
Where AWStats fails in comparison to other log analyzers like Analog is in dealing with rotated logs. AWStats is really designed to only handle a single monolithic log for each site, whereas other log analyzers can match multiple log files—thus permitting log rotation and compression. This isn’t necessarily a critical handicap, however, as there are plenty of situations where monolithic log files (or just the most recent cycle of rotated logs) are exactly what you want to analyze.
Overall, AWStats is an excellent choice for log file analysis, as long as your needs aren’t particularly complex. If your Server runs low-traffic sites, or you’re comfortable with monolithic log files and don’t feel like spending time compiling programs, AWStats is a great tool to use.