Tools that enable analysis of the log entries
Provided you have the necessary rights to access the log file of your web server, it’s theoretically possible to check individual client accesses to your project manually without the use of additional tools. Assume, however, that your site has around 1,000 visitors a day who visit an average of ten pages – 10,000 new log file entries would be created every day, and that count doesn’t include the embedded content. Such a large quantity would be impossible to evaluate manually. For log file analysis, tools with which you can export and segment data are needed.
If the volume of log files is manageable, then conventional data processing tools, such as Microsoft Excel, can be used to convert the log file to the CSV format and import it – as described in the following Microsoft instructions. In Excel, you can organize information about collected queries and sort them, for example, by IP address, status code, or referrer. But because there are limitations on the size of an imported log, the results of an Excel log file analysis can only ever provide a snapshot.
For longer-term investigations of your traffic based on log files, the use of a log file analyzer is recommended. Unlike calculation programs, these tools were specially developed for graphical display and evaluation of log files. In dashboards, which can be accessed via an ordinary browser, the previously mentioned code digits taken from the log file are visually processed – part of this happens almost in real-time, for example, with the open source tool GoAccess which we have discussed elsewhere.