This is a summary of my comprehensive search for a decent web analytics system. We have a dedicated server that collects, archives, and then processes all of our web logs from various systems that we run. We run different OSs, application servers, and web servers, so the web analytics has to be able to handle multiple formats, and in some cases, clustered log systems.

We were using Webtrends for the last 4 years, but I was never really happy with it. It is expensive, the statistics are inaccurate, the interface is slow and cumbersome, administration is a nightmare, and they no longer support running on Linux (I had to monitor the zombie processes and kill the server every other day because it froze up).

So I started a search for a replacement, looking at hosted options, for pay options, and open source options. Here is what I came up with for anyone who is also looking:

1. NetTracker — This is the system that we eventually purchased. It is truly amazing, the best web analytics software out there. Not very expensive, extremely powerful, and very lightweight on the server side. We chose the flat file database option because it was cheaper, and performance is incredible. The statistics are much more accurate and the user interface is extremely fast. It will process dynamic pages using URL parameters and other session factors. I can’t say enought good things about this software.

2. AWStats — a fast, open source, very powerful package that gives many options, professional results, and detailed reports. A nice feature is the ability to search for any page within a site and get stats on that page. Nice open source alternative to for pay options.

3. Webalizer — a good, fast, basic analytics package that allows you to run multiple reports for different servers, although it doesn’t do clustered servers. We run webalizer every night on a series of web logs that produces statistics for individual web sites. Works very well and is good for basic reporting.

If you have any others that you think are better, feel free to post a comment below.

This has been frustrating me for a few days. We are transitioning all of our servers from Red Hat to SuSE and I have had a dickens of a time using PuTTY from my Windows desktop to SSH into the newly configured servers. Also, when using tools such as pstree or yast, the characters to draw the lines where garbled. Here are a couple of tips that I found:

To login to SuSE using PuTTY, make sure the following configurations are set:
Connection > SSH: Preferred SSH protocol version: 2 only
Connection > SSH > Auth: Attempt “keyboard-interactive” auth (SSH2)

For the window drawing problem, set the following:
Window > Translation: Recieved data assumed to be in which character set: UTF-8
Window > Translation: Handling of line drawing characters: Use Unicode for line drawing

Hopefully this will save someone some time. If you have any more, please post a comment.

There have been a number of good articles lately that show how to install Apache 2 in a secure way on various *NIX servers. Security Focus has 2 articles, Securing Apache 2 and Apache 2 with SSL/TLS. The first describes a way to secure Apache 2 in chroot jail, the second shows how to set up Apache 2 with SSL enabled.

There is also a module you can build and use called mod_security, an open source intrusion detection system for Apache. This will warn of certain types of web attacks. A nice alternative to deploying a full IDS like Snort.