Managing and Summarizing Log Data
Now that we have set up our logging, we can sit back and wait for the information to accumulate. But at this point, it's worth thinking about what we are collecting; and what we're going to do with it. If you have installed one of the commercial site management packages (such as Microsoft Site Server), you will have features at your fingertips for analyzing the files. There are also several commercial stand-alone log file analysis packages available.
However, we're going to look deeper into the whole topic, and build some of our own routines for managing and analyzing Web server log and session information files. It frees us from the limitations or product lock-in that other packages will include, and allows us to do exactly what we want with the data as far as storing, archiving, summarizing and using it—and above all understanding it—is concerned.