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Readme for analog3.1

Basic commands

Here is a list of basic configuration commands to get you started with analog. These commands should be added to your configuration file, analog.cfg, as explained in the section Starting to use analog. We'll see all the possible configuration commands in later sections.

Analog reads logfiles produced by your web server, and produces an output file based on the data in them. So you need to know how to specify which logfile to read, and which file to send the output to. The relevant commands look like

LOGFILE my_logfile
OUTFILE output.html

where, of course, you should substitute the names of the files you want to use. The logfile must be on your local disk -- analog doesn't fetch it from across the network, so if it's not on your local disk, you will have to fetch it yourself first. You can read several logfiles by giving several logfile commands, or by giving a comma-separated list, or by using wild cards in the logfile name. So, for example, if you use the commands

LOGFILE new1.log,old*.log
LOGFILE new2.log

analog will analyse the logfiles new1.log, new2.log, and all the old logfiles. Analog will recognise logfiles in several different formats. You can read more about this in the section Choosing a logfile.

There are a couple of other commands you need to know right at the beginning, not because they're particularly important in themselves, but because the output will look silly if you don't know them. First, you need to know how to put your own organisation's name and URL at the top of the report. For this, you need two commands such as

HOSTNAME "Spam Widgets Inc."
HOSTURL www.spam-widgets.com

If you have broken images in the output instead of graphs, you need to say in which directory on your server the images are stored. You do this by a command like

IMAGEDIR /analog/images/

(The images are distributed with the program - you will have to move them to whichever directory you choose.)

Next you will want to know how to turn individual reports on and off. Analog can produce 27 different reports, but here are the most important. Try them and see what happens. You can turn each report on with an ON command, or off with an OFF command. You can also use the commands ALL ON and ALL OFF to turn all reports on or off.

MONTHLY ON    # one line for each month
WEEKLY ON     # one line for each week
FULLDAILY ON  # one line for each day
DAILY ON      # one line for each day of the week
HOURLY ON     # one line for each hour of the day
GENERAL ON    # the General Summary at the top
REQUEST ON    # which files were requested
FAILURE ON    # which files were not found
DIRECTORY ON  # directory report
HOST ON       # which computers requested files
DOMAIN ON     # which countries they were in
REFERRER ON   # where people followed links from
FAILREF ON    # where people followed broken links from
BROWSER ON    # which browsers people were using
FILETYPE ON   # types of file requested
SIZE ON       # sizes of files requested

The referrer and browser reports will only appear if your server records the necessary information. You can configure lots of other things about each report, such as how many rows are listed, which columns are included, and how the reports are sorted. For example, the command

REQINCLUDE pages

tells analog only to list pages, rather than all files, in the request report. You can read about all the options in the sections on Time reports, Other reports and Hierarchical reports.

You can have the output in several different languages, by using a LANGUAGE command. For example, the command

LANGUAGE FRENCH

will give you the output in French. The available languages at the moment are CHINESE, CZECH, DANISH, DUTCH, ENGLISH, US-ENGLISH, FINNISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, GREEK, HUNGARIAN, ITALIAN, NORWEGIAN (Bokmål), NYNORSK, POLISH, PORTUGUESE, BR-PORTUGUESE, ROMANIAN, RUSSIAN, SLOVAK, SLOVENE, SPANISH, SWEDISH and TURKISH. See the section on Configuring the output for how to download, or even translate, new languages.

Two other common things you might want to do are to alias files or hosts (for example, to tell analog that two different filenames are really the same file), or to include or exclude certain files, hosts or dates (to ignore accesses from your site, for example, or to do an analysis only of a certain subdirectory or a certain time period. For these, see the later sections on Aliases and Inclusions and exclusions.

As I said, these are only a few of the commands available. To find out about all the commands, you'll have to read the remaining sections of the Readme, starting with a short section on the syntax of configuration commands.

Stephen Turner
E-mail: sret1@cam.ac.uk

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