Webalizer
Webalizer is the free Web log analysis software. It is a command line application, which is written in C language to become highly portable and extremely fast. It is available in over 30 languages and its current version is 2.23–08. It is licensed under GNU GPL (General Public License). It reports several statistics like visits, hits, referrers, locality of the visitors, and amount of downloaded data. The reports generated can be viewed in both graphical and columnar format, and are highly detailed. It was first made by Bradford L. Barrett.
Webalizer is a GPL application. It is launched from the OS shell prompt. It analyzes web server log files, extracts items like client’s IP addresses, referrers, user agents, processing times, URL paths, and produces HTML reports by grouping them. Webalizer can process Apache, CLF & W3C Extended log files, and HTTP proxy log files which are produced by Squid servers. Other log files are normally converted to CLF for getting analyzed. Logs compressed with BZip2 (.bz2) or GZip (.gz) can be analyzed directly without uncompressing it.
It can be configured through parameters of a configuration file. It reads the file webalizer.conf by default and interprets every line of it as a processing instruction. A user- specified file can be provided by using ‘-c’ option. Webalizer is a highly configurable web traffic analysis application as more than a hundred configuration parameters are available.
It can analyze a log file with approximately 2 million hits in about 30 seconds which means it is very fast. It includes built-in native Geolocation services and distributed DNS lookup capability. It supports IPv4 and IPv6 addresses fully. It prevents data duplication by keeping track of the timestamp of the last record processed.
It has an incremental run capability. It supports unlimited log file sizes. It allows logs to be rotated, whenever needed It saves and restores all the data (internal) in a file called ‘webalizer.current’ which allows the preservation of details from one run to the next. The data file is a plain ASCII text file and its name can be changed by using ‘IncrementalName’ configuration keyword.
Reports generated by Webalizer
Two kinds of reports are generated: a detailed monthly report for every analyzed month and a yearly summary report. The yearly summary report is accompanied by the yearly summary graph, and it provides the information like number of file, hits & page requests, hosts & visits. It also contains averages of these counters for every month. The monthly report is generated as a single HTML page. It contains a monthly summary report, a daily report, an aggregated hourly report, a URL report, a host report, website entry & exit URL reports, a referrer report, a search string report, a country report and a user agent report. It can be configured to produce comma- delimited dump files. They have all the reported data in a plain- text file. They can be imported to databases or spreadsheet applications for more analysis. The number of lines of every report is controlled by configuration. The configuration can be changed to produce separate reports for every item like all website visitors, URLs, etc. The files produced are:
