GoAccess

I have discovered this useful tool for web-server log analysis – GoAccess.

It is a pretty nifty tool and shows various information collated from a typical NCSA log file produced by most web-servers. This tool came in handy recently, particularly when trouble-shooting specific customer complaints about a service that we launched for a client.

I would often extract the relevant portions from the main log file and use this tool to visualise the affected customer’s issue. While this tool does not show everything, it shows enough to get the big picture of a customer’s usage patterns.

It shows:

1. The number of visits;
2. The network and geographic location;
3. The device(s) and browsers used;
4. The amount of data transferred;

While it doesn’t paint a specific usage pattern, it does give us an immediate view on things. We can always manually zoom into the relevant parts of the logs to build a usage time-line.