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Advanced Log Analyzer 1.5 - User Guide and FAQ
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Quick start Advanced Log Analyzer.
Analyzing a sample log file
When analyzer starts for the first time, normally all you need to do is to press the Analyze button on the Main tab.
Analyzer will start processing a log file and you will see the results of the analysis under the Results tab.
At this stage it's better to learn which reports analyzer provides, and familiarize yourself with the interface which consists of the following tabs:
- Main tab, for analyzing and downloading log files.
- Reports tab, for setting up your own reports and customizing existing reports.
- Sites tab, for setting up your own web site.
- Results tab, for displaying HTML reports.
So study this and play around a little before analyzing your own web site.
Setting up your own site
Depending on your level of knowledge, before starting you need to understand 'what a log file is' and what log file analysis is all about.
A log file is a normal text file in which your web server records the activity of your site. In the log file each line represents a single access to a web resource.
For instance, if you viewed the about.htm page on your site and it contained a single picture (photo.jpg - your photo), then the web server will write two lines in the log file: one for about.htm and one for photo.jpg.
Normally log files are stored on the web server, and you can access them using a normal ftp client. Typically log files are called access_log for Apache web sites and ex0203.log (composed with current year and month) for an IIS web server.
Frequently Asked Questions - Advanced Log Analyzer
- ALA performs an analysis and then it displays reports with no data, what should I do?
The reason for this is usually in the log format. Normally you select the IIS 5.0 log format from the list of formats.
From working with customers I have found that IIS 5.0 has 8, or even more log formats and they are all called IIS log formats.
So what I recommend is to press the 'Recognize' button when setting up the log format.
It will automatically recognize your format and it will create the appropriate settings.
- ALA creates reports, but some of them are empty, why?
We tried to include all the reports a customer would want in our analyzer.
A few of the reports, for instance Ref sites of the programs, Ref domains for programs are made for software sites that hold programs.
Therefore, if you are user of a normal, non-software site, you can remove these reports.
And you can also add special reports that reflect the structure of your site.
- Why is the index.htm file not found in the output directory?
When you create a new site, you can specify the directory where you want to produce the HTML files with reports.
Normally you should use the default directory, but if you have decided to use a custom output folder, please manually copy the following files from the default output folder: Index.htm, Progress.gif and Ala.css.
- How to filter out search engine bots and spiders from web statistics as they can pollute results?
There are two levers to do that in Advanced Log Analyzer: site level and reports level.
If you want to completely filter out search bots from all reports you should use site level filter: go to Sites tab, select your site, click on "Show Advanced Options", enter the following filter:
agent included_in_file spiders.ini skip_line
If you want to filter out search bots from any particular report: go to Reports tab, select the report, create new filter:
agent not_included_in_file spiders.ini
- Is it possible to automatically upload on a server the results of the analysis?
Now it's not possible directly in program. But we have separate product that is called: Abacre Web Site Uploader. This product is full-featured ftp upload client specially designed to for upload tasks of any complexity.
For example, in ALA you use c:\Program Files\Advanced Log Analyzer\ala_out as output folder on reports. Then in Abacre Web Site Uploader you create new profile and define c:\Program Files\Advanced Log Analyzer\ala_out as Local web site path. In remote web server you may create new folder, for example, www.yourcompany.com/stats/ and set /stats/ as remote paths for this folder.
Normally ALA and AWSU both should the used in scheduled mode and therefore they would work automatically.
Maybe in future version of ALA we will implement some support of basic reports uploading on remote web site.
Currently we have some small issues in AWSU with schedule. They will be fixed next week. I will let you know by email then.
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