What is AWStats / Features Overview

AWStats is short for Advanced Web Statistics. AWStats is powerful log analyzer which creates advanced web, ftp, mail and streaming server statistics reports based on the rich data contained in server logs. Data is graphically presented in easy to read web pages.

AWStats development started in 1997 and is still developed today by same author (Laurent Destailleur). However, development is now done on "maintenance fixes" or small new features. Reason is that author spend, since July 2008, most of his time as project leader on another major OpenSource projet called Dolibarr ERP & CRM and works also at full time for TecLib, a french Open Source company. A lot of other developers maintains the software, providing patches, or packages, above all for Linux distributions (fedora, debian, ubuntu...).

Designed with flexibility in mind, AWStats can be run through a web browser CGI (common gateway interface) or directly from the operating system command line. Through the use of intermediary data base files, AWStats is able to quickly process large log files, as often desired. With support for both standard and custom log format definitions, AWStats can analyze log files from Apache (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF or common/CLF log format), Microsoft's IIS (W3C log format), WebStar and most web, proxy, wap and streaming media servers as well as ftp and mail server logs.

See how the most famous open source statistics tools (AWStats, Analog, Webalizer) stack up feature by feature in this comparison table.

AWStats is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL v3). The license chart illustrates what you can and can't do.
As AWStats works from the command line as well as a CGI, it is compatible with all web hosting providers which allow CGI and log access.

Features

AWStats' reports include a wide range of information on your web site usage:
* Number of Visits, and number of Unique visitors.
* Visit duration and latest visits.
* Authenticated Users, and latest authenticated visits.
* Usage by Months, Days of week and Hours of the day (pages, hits, KB).
* Domains/countries (and regions, cities and ISP with Maxmind proprietary geo databases) of visitor's hosts (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected).
* Hosts list, latest visits and unresolved IP addresses list.
* Most viewed, Entry and Exit pages.
* Most commonly requested File types.
* Web Compression statistics (for Apache servers using mod_gzip or mod_deflate modules).
* Visitor's Browsers (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version, 123 browsers detected: Web, Wap, Streaming Media browsers..., around 482 with the "phone browsers" database).
* Visitor's Operating Systems (pages, hits, KB for each OS, 45 OS detected).
* Robots visits, including search engine crawlers (381 robots detected).
* Track Downloads such as PDFs, compressed files and others
* Search engines, Keywords and Phrases used to find your site (The 122 most famous search engines are detected like Yahoo, Google, Altavista, etc...)
* HTTP Errors (Page Not Found with latest referrer, ...).
* User defined reports based on url, url parameters, referrer (referer) fields extend AWStats' capabilities to provide even greater technical and marketing information.
* Number of times your site is added to Bookmarks / Favorites.
* Screen size (to capture this, some HTML tags must be added to a site's home page).
* Ratio of integrated Browser Support for: Java, Flash, Real G2 player, Quicktime reader, PDF reader, WMA reader (as above, requires insertion of HTML tags in site's home page).
* Cluster distribution for load balanced servers.

In addition, AWStats provides the following:
* Wide range of log formats. AWStats can analyze: Apache NCSA combined (XLF/ELF) or common (CLF) log files, Microsoft IIS log files (W3C), WebStar native log files and other web, proxy, wap, streaming media, ftp and mail server log files. See AWStats F.A.Q. for examples.
* Reports can be run from the operating system command line and from a web browser as a CGI (common gateway interface). In CGI mode, dynamic filter capabilities are available for many charts.
* Statistics update can be run from a web browser as well as scheduled for automatic processing.
* Unlimited log file size
* Load balancing system split log files.
* Support 'nearly sorted' log files, even for entry and exit pages.
* Reverse DNS lookup before or during analysis; supports DNS cache files.
* Country detection from IP location (geoip) or domain name.
* Plugins for US/Canadian Regions, Cities and major countries regions, ISP and/or Organizations reports (require non free third product geoipregion, geoipcity, geoipisp and/or geoiporg database).
* WhoIS lookup links.
* Vast array of configurable options/filters and plugins supported.
* Modular design supports inclusion of addition features via plugins.
* Multi-named web sites supported (virtual servers, great for web-hosting providers).
* Cross Site Scripting Attacks protection.
* Reports available in many international languages. See AWStats F.A.Q. for full list. Users can provide files for additional languages not yet available.
* No need for esoteric perl libraries. AWStats works with all basic perl interpreters.
* Dynamic reports through a CGI interface.
* Static reports in one or framed HTML or XHTML pages; experimental PDF export through 3rd party "htmldoc" software.
* Customize look and color scheme to match your site design; with or without CSS (cascading style sheets).
* Help and HTML tooltips available in reports.
* Easy to use - all configuration directives are confined to one file for each site.
* Analysis database can be stored in XML format for easier use by external applications, like XSLT processing (one xslt transform example provided).
* A Webmin module is supplied.
* Absolutely free (even for web hosting providers); source code is included (GNU General Public License).
* Works on all platforms with Perl support.
* AWStats has a XML Portable Application Description.

Requirements:
AWStats usage has the following requirements:
* You must have access to the server logs for the reporting you want to perform (web/ftp/mail).
* You must be able to run perl scripts (.pl files) from command line and/or as a CGI. If not, you can solve this by downloading latest Perl version at ActivePerl (Win32) or Perl.com (Unix/Linux/Other).
See AWStats F.A.Q. for examples of supported OS and Web servers.

Article written by Laurent Destailleur.

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