Analog is a program to analyse the logfiles from your web server. It tells you which pages are most popular, which countries people are visiting from, which sites they tried to follow broken links from, etc. It has the following advantages over other similar programs.
• It's free (under the conditions of the licence).
• It's fast… Very fast. Analog can uncompress and process 2 million logfile lines per minute (on a 350MHz G3, your mileage may vary). That's 1GB of data every 5 minutes!
• It's easy to install and run.
• Analog can handle very large logfiles. Results depend on your system, but at least one site using it on logfiles of over 250 million lines (25GB) with no trouble.
• It's very flexible. The default output will be satisfactory for most people, but there are hundreds of options producing 27 different reports for those who want to do things differently.
• It can output in 30 different languages.
• It understands WebStar, Quid Pro Quo, Boulevard, MacHTTP, Microsoft Personal Web Server, Apple Share IP 5.0, NCSA common log file format, NCSA/Apache combined format, referrer log, browser log, W3C extended format, Microsoft IIS v3 and v4 format, Netscape format, and the user can specify additional formats.
• It should work on any Macintosh, and versions are also available for Windows (3, 95 & NT), DOS, lots of flavors of Unix, OS/2, VMS, Acorn RiscOS, BeOS, and BS2000/OSD.
• A recent survey showed that over 25% of webmasters use Analog, more than any other logfile analysis program. Try asking AltaVista for some of them.
• Oh, one more thing. It is Year 2000 compatible. (And so were all previous versions).
New in Analog 3.3.2: This is a minor update. Updated to the lattest Unix version. New language Serbo-Croatian; new domains files for Italian and Russian; corrected Polish language files. Additional documentation. Unsafe characters in hyperlinks now escaped. One bug that caused crashes when printing deep Directory Reports is fixed.
New in Analog 3.3.1a: Drag and drop stoped working in 3.3 but no one noticed till now. This fixes it.
This is a port of Analog 3.3.2 to the Macintosh. It does not support a Macintosh
style user interface or the Analog form cgi. Configuration is done in the analog.cfg and manconf.cfg files. See the Readme.html file in the docs folder for more information on the settings in these files. The Mac version uses the configuration file commands and does not require you to recompile anything, although you can if you get the source code and have Metrowerks Codewarrior.
Analog for the Macintosh assumes that you are processing WebSTAR log files by default. Since it is not yet a completly native Macintosh program, there is no standard file dialog for opening log files. Analog assumes that the log file you want to process is called WebSTAR.log and is in the same folder as the Analog program. Alternatively you can drag and drop a single log file on the Analog application.
If you are using logs that were not created by WebSTAR you can either rename the log file, or change the setting for LOGFILE in the analog.cfg file (it is right near the top). The LOGFILE and OUTFILE settings can both be full path names, just put the file name in quotes, for example OUTFILE "Hard disk:WebSTAR:analog report.html". You can also specify a list of log files for input seperated by commas, or use wildcards. For example LOGFILE "::*.log" will read all of the files that end in ".log" in the folder above the folder Analog is in.
You can drag and drop a configuration file or a log file on the Analog program. Note that only ONE log file can be processed in this way, if you drop multipule log files only the first will be processed. If the file starts with a '#' it is assumed to be a configuration file. This also allows a minimum level of Apple Script support, Analog can be told to "open" a file and it will do the same thing as if you droped the file on the Analog icon.
Support for WebStar Enhanced log files (WebStar version 1.2.1 or higher) requires that you include at least the following fields:
HOSTNAME or both CS-HOST and CS-IP, DATE, URL or CS-URI
It will also read BYTES-SENT, BYTES, TIME, RESULT, AGENT, REFERER and CS-STATUS, if present, to provide additional information or reports. Order should not matter, and additional fields will be ignored. Analog parses the field order from additional information in the log file provided by WebSTAR 1.2.1 or higher. The WebSTAR DNS lookup option is not required, if it is off you will just get the IP numbers in the reports instead of the host names, unless you set DNS to WRITE in analog.cfg, in which case Analog will do the DNS lookups.
Boulevard should be configured to produce Common Log Format or Common Log Format plus Referrer and User Agent (in that order).
Analog reads GZip (.gz) files automaticaly. People downloading logs from Unix machines will probably want to compress the log on the Unix machine, and Analog can then read that file directly. Mac users might also want to compress their log files to save disk space, this can be done with a program like MacGZip, available from InfoMac http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/Archive/cmp/mac-gzip-111.hqx and other places. GZip file reading based the ZLib library from Jean-loup Gailly (gzip@prep.ai.mit.edu) and Mark Adler (madler@alumni.caltech.edu). The zlib home page is http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/zlib/
If the report created by Analog does not show anything except a small header and there are a large number of courupt log file entries, Analog is probably failing to recognize that your log file is a WebSTAR log file. In order to read WebSTAR log files Analog looks for a line that starts with "!!LOG_FORMAT" followed by a list of fields seperated by spaces. Versions of WebSTAR prior to 1.2.1 do not have this line, and so cannot be read.
Analog will automaticaly exit when processing is complete, unless there were warning or debug messages. If you want Analog to always exit, set WARNINGS to OFF and DEBUG to OFF in analog.cfg. This is handy if you have set up Analog to run periodicaly on your server machine. Be carefull when using this option, since it is impossible to see most error messages in this mode.
Analog can also be controlled with AppleScript. It responds to the "do script" message. There is a single argument that is a quoted string containing Unix command line arguments. Use a script like the following:
tell application "Analog"
do script "+H"
end tell
The "+H" option tells Analog to turn on the full hourly report. Replace the "+H" with the command line options you want to use. See the documentation for the complete list of Unix style command line options. Be aware that Analog will start running when you send the do script command and your AppleScript will continue to execute while Analog is working.
For more information on Analog see the Readme.html file in the docs folder or http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/
For the latest information about and updates to the Mac version check
