Analog: Introduction

What is analog?

Analog is a program to measure the usage on your web server. It tells you which pages are most popular, which countries people are visiting from, which sites they tried to follow broken links from, and all sorts of other useful information.

How much does it cost?

Nothing. It's free.

How fast is it?

Very, very fast. I'm uncompressing and processing 56 million logfile lines in 35 minutes on a 266MHz chip: that's about 1GB of data every five minutes (see sample). Of course, newer machines will be faster.

How big a logfile can it cope with?

It depends on your system. But I know of one site using it on logfiles of over one billion lines (c. 100GB).

Can it speak different languages?

Yes. You can have the output in any of 31 different languages.

How configurable is it?

Very. The default output will be satisfactory for most people, but there are hundreds of options producing 32 different reports for those who want to do things differently.

Is it easy to install?

Yes. There are executables available for several platforms including Windows (95/NT and later) and Mac, and it compiles straight out of the box on most other platforms.

What platforms does it run on?

Almost any. It's written in standard C, so should compile on almost any machine with a C compiler. It's known to work under Windows (all versions), DOS, Mac, all Unix & Linux, OS/2, OpenVMS, Acorn RiscOS, BeOS, Mac OS X, NeXTSTEP, and several mainframes. And probably more I forgot to mention!

What web servers does it work with?

Any. The server just has to write its logfile in a form analog can read. Analog can read all standard formats, and the user can specify customised formats.

Can I see some samples?

Sure. Have a look at these pages from the University of Cambridge Statistical Laboratory.

• Server statistics
• Server statistics (more graphical, using Report Magic with analog)