AWStats Log Analyzer

It is a very useful tool which generates good reports as long as don't try to hack its source code. The coding style is awful and supports every prejudice against Perl you may have.

I do not know what I would do without AWStats

Awstats is probably the best free analyzer out there. The graphics are not too fancy, and clear. the features are covering many requirements. The whole software has however three major drawbacks:

1. The hits and pages on the charts are on the same scale. That means that 100 hits (to files) create a bar that goes to 100% of the height. If you make 10 hits to file with each page however (say you have 1 CSS file and 9 images in your layout and content), you will never see a pages bar that is higher than 10% of the chart. If your layout has some graphics, you have 2 CSS files and some images in the content you will never be able to distinguish the pages in your stats from one day or month to the next - the bar is simply too small.

2. no rolling months/days. On the first of january, you will see a whole year of empty data in front of you. comparison with the last year is almost impossible.

3. The hourly/daily etc stats miss the option to see them on average. So in each month, the stats by weekday are counted from zero: monday had x hits, tuesday zero etc. so until the month is over, the data is not comparable since one part of the weeks summs hits of 4 weeks and the last part of only 3.

and there is no improvement in view. While bugs are still fixed and the documentation is still improved, the features are frozen and the forums on sourceforge burst with spam that nobody deletes.