Does anyone else look at their server logs and what it is doing?
When I first started self-hosting, I used things like Analog, AWStats and Webalizer that read and graphed the server logs. Later on I used Google Analytics, but have decided to go back to reading the logs.
I’m also looking at other analyzers such as W3Perl, which is proving a pig to configure, and a couple of others.
The programs have been abandoned, forked, even abandoned again, but they still work. If anyone is interested in what these almost 30 year old programs look like and my experience with them, then https://brisray.com/utils/stats.htm is probably as good a place to start as any.
I’ve just started doing this, having moved to a shared hosting plan with cPanel that has these tools installed by default. I definitely get more insights than I would/do with a JS tracker.
I like AWStats as well. It’s one of the easiest to use and I love that it makes it’s own links so you can see all the results in each section instead of just the top 10.
Google Analytics is good and really does look nice but when they moved to GA4 I asked myself why I was using it. I don’t sell anything, don’t do any advertising so not interested in conversion rates, and not interested in tracking IP addresses through different pages.
The logs also record things that GA isn’t very good at.such as what was actually put into the address bar. That helps as it shows how someone is trying to get out of the web folders into the OS itself, or run some sort of script. That in turn helps me keep the server protected.
Mainly, I use it for specific use cases, such as figuring out which pages on my site are most popular. In the professional world, server logs have been very important for me in diagnosing issues with applications – such as with load balanced applications where one server may not be responding.
I could have kicked myself for messing up like that.
When you self-host one of the ideas is to rely on as few outside entities as you can. There’s some you can’t do without, and I was just a tad ticked off that I managed to meet Let’s Encrypt limits so quickly.
I sometimes use goaccess to analyze my logs and get a sense of what’s happening on my site. The only data I’m interested in is referrals because it’s how I discover if people are linking to my site which is a fun way for me to discover new blogs and new people. Other than that it’s also useful to see if there are strange errors.
i use umami instead of google analytics!
it’s less-invasive and open-source analytics tool. it shows me referrers, device type, and OS as well as country. (although I dont see the IPs)
I like Awstats, Google Analytics, and webalizer as well, but I prefer Cloudflare’s web analytics because it offers a lot more data and options you can see. I especially like the real-time data, showing where your traffic is actually coming from, the user agents, whether a visitor is using mobile or desktop, and the top countries driving the traffic.
Google Analytics provides some of this too, but if a visitor is using ad block, their data does not get included.
- it’s a 10 year old