Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

I’ve been using AWStats for a few years now and figured I would give it a plug. What is AWStats you may ask? Well, AWStats is a command line application that takes web logs generated by IIS or Apache, formats the log information, and is able to generate HTML reports on the traffic data.

Not only will it function on web server logs but it will also do the same for FTP and Mail server logs. The data is formatted into varying sections of interest. For web server logs it presents the specific browsers used, the number of unique visitors, pages accessed, and traffic to the site over a months period with previous months aggregated for a summary table. The information is incredibly handy to figure out traffic patterns, identify potential robots.txt ignoring search engines, bot attacks, and see what pages present a 404 or 500 error to be taken care of.

At some levels this program can be compared with Google Analytics (GA), but unlike GA AWStats can work on a specific log file or series of log files instead of being limited to live site visits. The same information is stored in the web server log so you’re actually getting more pertinent information from AWStats. AWStats exposes the same keyword referrers, bandwidth usage over time, and can show the individual days with traffic breakdowns. Handy information for any web hosting or personal user looking to not piss off the ISP.

The catch is you’ll have to install Perl in order to install/use AWStats but by visiting ActiveState there shouldn’t be a problem acquiring Perl for Windows for use with IIS web servers. The configuration is a breeze so long as you actually follow the documentation installed with the program. Essentially create a config file, change the config domain to the domain name being hosted, and map a new virtual directory to the cgi-bin installed under AWStats. That’s really it in a nut shell. Below is a screen capture from the AWStats project site so you can see the initial HTML generated report. There is a lot more to it so give the image a click to see the live site demo.