Yeah, the title pretty much says it all... I'm looking for a PHP-based (or at least not CGI or Perl) log analyzer that can tell me where folks are coming from, what search keyphrases are landing them here, and what types of computers they're using. And above all I'd like a nice organized interface, like the old AWStats that I used to use.
Any ideas? Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
I don't know how it does it, but I use www.BlogPatrol.com to track stats for my page.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
You don't need anything in PHP, most good log analyzers aren't. I suspect your web host will already have one, but if not, you might look at http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/ and http://www.analog.cx/ (note: you may well not have installation permissions needed, but I wouldn't be at all surprised were one or both of those packages already installed).
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
We are our hosts, our server is sitting in our office. I'll check those packages out, thanks! Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Hmm, okay, we don't want to be running a standalone C app, if that's what webalizer is... this one looks perfect, except that it doesn't actually list IP addresses. It does everything else, though! Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
*shrug* Those are two of the best free log analyzers out there; you just install them, then set up a cron job to run them periodically and put the results in a directory that's web accessible.
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Yeah, but that was the problem with AWstats... it's a beast to install and configure, and needing to set up a new config and cron job for each site on the server? Ugh. It shouldn't be that complicated. The server creates the log files, all this thing has to do is display them in a nice readable fashion.
Thanks for the pointers, though! I'll keep my eyes open.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Heh, both webalizer and analog are a breeze to install and configure; in fact, your linux distribution almost certainly has packages for both.
And as for the per site config and cron jobs, those're trivial, since you can just write a quick script that sets one up given a site name and directory to put the files in.
As for why you don't want a PHP one, log analysis requires fairly intensive processing. A PHP script that processes the log files each time will add significant load to your server when you use it (PHP grinds on programmatic image generation, plus just all the processing), will require vigilant patching as its a large potential security hole (your logs will quite possibly contain sensitive or security-related information), et cetera. I don't know how many sites you're intending on hosting, but if on a single fairly decent server you've got two or three log viewings going on at once, you may well see a noticeable slowdown in page generation.
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