Raw Log Files..

What's everyone using to view thier raw logs? Can you reccomend anything good? Maybe something like AWStats, since we can't run it on DASP servers. I have livestats enabled, but I just don't like it. Thanks, Tim

 

I have webtrends, is there any way to automate this? Having to ftp download the log file everyday seems a bit tedious.


Thanks,


Soren

 

If you want automatic logs, we provide analog (free) and livestats.



Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

Thanks Joel. I'm using LiveStats now, but our CEO isn't digging it (he's used to WebTrends). I don't imagine the analog would be any better.


Personally, I think LiveStats is pretty damn cool, but I'm seeing it from an admin/developer perspective and he wants more marketing-centric info.


I guess I'll just have to build some custom reports for him.


Regards,


Soren

 

also check out http://google.com/analytics/home <-- this is what I use.



Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

Ahh that is true clients without javascript will not be reported.


Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

GA definitely can not catch clients with no JavaScript, but if you look at the stats, this represents a pretty tiny portion of users these days. (According to w3schools 90% of web users have JavaScript turned on www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).

The bigger difference you may be seeing is that GA does not report the activity of bots or crawlers. So if half your hits are coming from web crawlers GA will give you lower numbers.

 

You likeGoogle AnalyticsJoel?

I foundit to be extremely inaccurate when I ran it for a couple of months on a site that gets 1000+ unique visits a day. I don't know if it's because GA ignores any visitor that has javascript disabled (the GA code is javascript), but whatever the reason, it only reported about 50% of the traffic.

If accuracy is important I would suggest you go for something that parses your logs, rather than some widget that runs out of your site files.








mjp
DiscountASP.NET
http://DiscountASP.NET

Post Edited (mjp) : 7/1/2006 12:46:53 AM GMT

 

I don't think five or six hundred unique bots were crawling the site every day. That's about how much the GA stats were off, on average. I would agree that users disabling javascript would probably not account for half the traffic being ignored, that's just one obvious issue I could see with the GA reporting method.

The other possibility is the remote file (http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js) that you have to call from the footer of the page(s) was not consistently available or slow, etc., but I gave it over two months on three very active sites (4 to 5k unique visitors total per day) and the results were pretty consistent, so I ruled that out.

I guess I'm just throwing my experience out there as an FYI to anyone who is considering GA. If you implement it, I would suggest checking it against another stats source for a few weeks to make sure it's logging all of your traffic.


mjp
DiscountASP.NET
http://DiscountASP.NET