In 2005, France’s leading TV and media company needed a solution to analyze their web sites’ traffic. Our configuration tool can define the format of the log file, so any format, even custom files, are supported. What log formats can be analyzed, and is there a limit of log size?ĪWStats can analyze any log file as long as it a text file. Since AWStats was developed in Perl, it will run on all platforms and operating systems.
Modifying AWStat’s engine to analyze other log files was easy, so the tool was enhanced to analyze email servers (reporting input and output emails) and media server logs (detailing time spent on media files, from where, when, etc.). AWStats uses this information to deduce if your site’s traffic is real, a worm, or a robot – and presents this information in a graphical view. These log files contain a lot of information, including number of visited pages and images downloaded as well as when, from which IP address, and by which browser, the site was accessed. What information is analyzed by AWStats, and how is it beneficial to site owners?ĪWStats needs only one web server log file to function but can compile data from several log files and several web servers as if it was a single server file. AWStats is different as it uses several dedicated algorithms for more accurate results. For many reasons, this way of calculating traffic produces incorrect conclusions. Most other log analyzers just count the number of lines in the log file to determine the number of visits. What is AWStats?ĪWStats is a tool for analyzing a web server’s technical log to compile data and report on the site’s traffic in a clear and easily understandable way. However, I found their results inaccurate or difficult to understand, so I began to develop my own tool, called AWStats. Needing a tool to analyze the traffic for these sites, I started testing existing tools like Analog, Webalizer, and other proprietary software. On the side, I developed my company’s web site as well as other sites on miscellaneous topics. In 1999, after receiving my engineering degree in electronics, I worked at an IT company providing development services for large companies.
Please tell us a little bit about your background before founding AWStats.
This interview was originally published on April 19, 2020. We spoke with founder Laurent Destailleur (Eldy) about how it all began, what makes it superior to the other tools out there, and why he chose to share it freely as an Open Source software. AWStats is the premier web analytics reporting tool for analyzing data from web server logs to report on services such as web, streaming media, mail, and FTP servers.