Well, another day of "down time". I'm filling in a shift at the colo for one of my company's operators. She's going to LISA 2001 and I'm bored in the NOC. So it's time for news. Joy!

If you are looking for a good web usage statistics package, take a look at The Webalizer. It's very nice. Installation is what first attracted me to it: you unzip a file, make a symlink to a shorter name (optional, but a habit), and point it at the location of your log file. It works with any log rotation system because when it goes through your logfile, it makes its own database. That means when your logs get rotated out, your old usage data are still there. No need to keep large log files around.

I usually set it up to go run via cron. Here's a typical way to do it:

15 1 * * * /home/wee/webalizer/webalizer -o /home/wee/html/usage /var/log/httpd/access_log > /dev/null 2>&1

That would run webalizer at 1:15 every morning against the log file at /var/log/httpd/access_log and place the output in /home/wee/html/usage.

The graphs and such that you get are another nice thing. Everything is viewable via a web browser. Webalizer makes an index page which lists every month that it has info for, and then links to sub-pages for each month. The monthly usage pages have information like visits, hits, traffic graphed by hour, referers, etc. If it's in your logs files, then it's in the graphs.