Need

Web page statistics is a critical component of managing websites. Monitoring your web pages with the help of a simple counter is fine if you are running a personal website. However, commercial websites have to go beyond this. Effective marketing calls for information such as the most accessed web pages, hourly statistics, geographic information, time spent by the visitors on your site, entry and exit pages etc. Most of the hosting companies provide some sort of statistical tool to analyze your website. However, these may or may not meet your requirements. There are quite a number of packages available with a wide price range depending on the features. But, would you like to spend money on them if your site is not a commercial one or does not generate enough revenue? A good option would be to try products that are of Open Source. This article outlines one such product called 'Analog', a very popular web analysis software used by ISPs and several organizations.

• Download the access log files - Most of the web hosting providers give raw log files for analysis. Check with your Hosting provider if unsure. Without the access logs, you will not be able to proceed further.
• Download the software from Analog's website.
• Unzip the contents of the file to a separate folder, say, analog.
• Open analog.cfg using a text editor. This is the configuration file and is located in the Analog folder.
• Modify the following lines in analog.cfg to get a basic report:

 * LOGFILE: Should point to the path to the access log file 
(Access log downloaded from your web server - 
The Logfile Input region).
 * OUTFILE: Name of the report. Default is Report.html
 * HOSTNAME: Name of your website.

Save analog.cfg and run analog.exe to compile log statistics. Open report.html to analyze the report.

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