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British Virgin Islands, 09/22/04
Review of Advanced Log Analyzer by Roman Vasin's Abacre Corp
Advanced Log Analyzer by Vasin, Roman's Abacre Corp residing in a post box on the British Virgin Islands is a Windows Shareware application to analyze apache and IIS webserver logs. It can be tested 30 days for free and then it has to be registered with ShareIt efulfillment system for 49 USD for private entities or 129 USD for corporations.
There are two versions for download, a version for the windows cmd console and a GUI application. Both called CGI enabled, but are in fact Windows 32 applications. TrafficStatistic tried out the GUI application.
Installation was easy and smooth, after installation it is needed to create some reports by clicking around in the GUI. Importing Log data is already a bit more tricky, in the first case we needed to manually define the configuration in the main.ini configuration file using a text editor and then it was needed to change all the LF in the log file to CR/LF.
After this configuration processing of a 2 MB uncompressed logfile piece from our Apache on Linux went through in a couple of seconds. The reports are easy to understand, there are plenty of reports and the reports are really highly configurable. Special features are tracking of downloads and image files, what is rather useful for software authors providing files to download and user movement paths, what is important for verifying success of pay-per-click advertizing campaigns. In another test we put in 5 MB gzip compressed Apache logfiles, which were processed in less then 5 minutes. All in all Advanced Log Analyzer gave us some interesting new views on our logdata, but is far from being the one and only log analyser to use.
What we also like:
- Roman, the author of Advanced Log Analyzer gives free support in web forum
What we didn't like in Advanced Log Analyzer:
- not being able to destinct reliable between humans and bots, having about 75% of bot traffic from several hundred bots makes it impossible to tell anything about human visits
( there can be applied filters for bots based on based on user agents, but entering several hundred bots via GUI seems not to be a practible idea, it would be much better, if Advanced Log Analyzer could load predefined lists from the manufacturer )
- some small bugs like in a beta like need for manual LF to CR/LF change on uncompressed logs, frozen GUI on having placed executables in log dir, search words named search engines and vice versa
- the need to define all reports before they can be used, a default set of reports would really make configuration time shorter
- the need to reprocess all log files after a new report was defined
- the need to reprocess log files to view data for diffrent time periods
But all in all Advanced Log Analyzer is a nice tool, the plenty of configurable reports are it's killer feature.
Link provided: http://www.abacre.net/ala/index.htm
Added by: Traffic Statistics Webmaster
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