The less well known log analysers

Yesterday, I took a look at three big names in web log analysis; analog, awstats and webalizer. Today is the turn of some less well known products that are listed on freshmeat.

There are hundreds, so only the products that do not have the appearence of abandonware were anlysed. That is only products that have released a new build during the past few months were looked at.

The first such was Visitors, a nice little 70kb download. Installation was a piece of cake (just type make). Running it though is not quite the same because Visitors does not seem to have a configuration file. All the settings have to be passed in as command line parameters. Secondly it does not allow you to change the logfile format, but since it recognized my own files I shouldn't be complaining.

Visitors has two features to help you figure out what 'trails' a visitor took through your site. As the author of analog takes great pains to explain such reports are unreliable and downright misleading. The second feature (related to the first), is the ability to produce a graph of the visitor's path. It requires the graphviz package to be installed.

Next I tried something called logmine. Words fail me.

Then I tried a program called Nettracker, it claims to be an award winner. Who ever gave them the award didn't try their installer.

The next victim was Web Druid a webalizer fork, and that sounds promising. Webdruid can also interact with graphviz to show you which paths the user took through your site. I didn't bother to find out if this feature was infact available in webalizer.

Looks like another study, this time a comparision of webalizer and webdruid is in order, but first they need to be persuaded to accept my log files.