Analog is an open source application for analyzing web statistics.  This is one really powerful and flexible program.  And yes, it's free!

The Community Foundation of Sarasota County (CFSC) needed web statistics for their web sites and everyone kept telling us that we had to purchase "Web Trends" to do this.  Well, Web Trends was going to cost us between $600 and $2500 depending upon what options we wanted.  That's an expensive pill to swallow!  Then Stan Schultes of the Sarasota .NET Developers Group turned me on to Analog, and we've never looked back.  Thanks, Stan!

Here are some of the statistics available to you:

• Number of pages requested per time period (hour, day, week, month, etc.)
• Countries of requester (.dk, .uk, etc.)
• Organization breakdown of requestors (Verizon, Comcast, AOL, etc.)
• Referrers
• Search Queries
• Browsers
• Operating Systems
• Status Codes (i.e. 200 OK, 404 Document not found, etc.)
• File Types
• Request Failures
• Which specific files were requested

This program isn't for the faint of heart, though.  It takes some time to read through the documentation, set up the report, and then understand the results.  The documentation provided is excellent, though, unlike some other open source projects.  Also, you won't escape the complexity factor with Web Trends either, as I've heard that program also has a large learning curve. 

To help people get through the learning curve, I've put together a "play-by-play" procedure that I used to setup and customize analog for this web site.  This is a complex configuration involving 7 separate configuration files for web statistical analysis over 7 time periods:

• Since Day 1
• Last 1 Day
• Last 7 Days
• Last 30 Days
• Last 90 Days
• Last 182 Days
• Last 365 Days

I've provided 4 different files:

• Analog Setup Example.doc
  • This is the "play-by-play" procedure.
• Analog-CFG.zip
  • This contains the 7 configuration files and the batch file needed to run the 7 configurations.
• CFSC-007.html.pdf
  • This is an example of the 7 day report in PDF format.
• CFSC-090.html.pdf
  • This is an example of the 90 day report in PDF format.

The sample reports don't contain the sections of the report showing the search terms and search queries even though these reporting options were enabled.  This is because this website has been kept private up to this point, so no search engines have found it yet (as of 9/24/06).

For more information about this killer application, go to:   http://www.analog.cx/