Traffic Tracking
Everyone that runs a web site wants to know “How am I doing?” The total number of hits, the number of unique visitors, and what pages are the most popular are just a few of the metrics that gauge a site’s traffic. All of that important data exists in the web server’s log — if only you can tease it out. While several commercial applications provide such analysis, The Webalizer is a free and fast log analyzer that may just be superior, too. Here’s a hands-on guide.
Thursday, March 16th, 2006
Nearly everyone who runs a web site wants to know “How am I doing?” How many hits am I getting? Which of my pages are the most popular? How are visitors finding my site? Is anybody else linking to me? Of course, all of the answers are captured in the web server’s logs, so the question ultimately becomes “What analysis software should I use?”
There are lots of choices. There are several expensive commercial solutions, such as Webtrends (which recently dropped Linux support), and an even larger number of open source options. Most of the free solutions are written in Perl — a natural choice for a text processing-intensive job like log analysis, but also a CPU hog.
So let’s take a look at an alternative written in
C. The Webalizer, written by Bradford Barrett and available at
http://www.webalizer.com, was designed for
speed: it can process log data
much faster than anything written in Perl, a good thing for busy web sites with huge log files and already-taxed CPUs. Webalizer typically runs out of
cron at regular intervals — hourly or daily — and it creates customnized
HTML reports that can be viewed from any browswer.
Building and Installing The Webalizer
The Webalizer web site offers many binary distributions and the installation instructions are good.
