If you are running a web server and haven't yet had time to look carefully at your log files, run, don't walk to get yourself a copy of WebTrends. This is a piece of software that does one thing, but does it well: it takes the mass of information in these files and summarizes it in a meaningful way along with providing lots of graphs and tables. It is software that is appropriate for mid-level manager and webmaster alike.
All web servers produce several different kinds of log files, and most of them (Microsoft's IIS is a notable exception) produce them in what is called Common Log Format. This means that tools such as Windows-based WebTrends can read this information in and process it. WebTrends looks at one kind of log -- called the access log -- to determine who has been visiting your web site (based on their IP address), what pages they have looked at, and when. It then generates a report in HTML that can be viewed, saved, and printed by your handy web browser. There are other log files, such as what page referred them to your site and any errors that were encountered along the way --- the software doesn't examine these, however.
There are plenty of products that can do this job. I've tried a variety of home-grown perl scripts and tested a beta version of HitList from MarketWave (another commercial Windows analyzer). There are tons others, as a quick Yahoo search on the words "log analyzer" will demonstrate -- but none do it as easily or as elegantly as WebTrends.
I've been using both the new version as well as the first version of the product for several months on both Windows 95 and Windows NT (WebTrends is a 16-bit product) to examine my web server running O'Reilly's WebSite. At the end of each month, I download a copy of my access log and run it through WebTrends to see what is going on with my site. Each time, I learn all sorts of things about my site: for example, one of my newsletters that I wrote in January is still among the most popular page viewed in August, and about 20 percent of my visitors are from outside the U.S. I also can find out patterns of usage for my web site based on time of day and day of the week -- surprisingly, there are quite a few people visiting my site while I am fast asleep.
Version 2.0 adds a few new features, such as the ability to combine multiple log files into a single report. Another important enhancement is support for Japanese, French, and German -- this is nice for those multinational companies that want to send reports to their management in the appropriate language. And, WebTrends automatically adjusts its perspective so that the reports for "domestic" and "international" users make sense for the appropriate country context.
I found a few glitches in the software however. I ran a report on the same log file with both version 1 and 2 copies of the software, and got slightly different summary statistics. While the numbers were off by less than 1%, it is disconcerting nonetheless that they aren't exactly the same. Also, I had to remember to copy both the summary .HTML report along with the supporting .GIF files that make up the graphs when I wanted to manually move the report to another location on my file server -- I had forgotten to move the accompanying graphics. But these are small matters. Overall, the product is first-rate, and will get you more involved in improving your website by understanding what your visitors are doing there.