best "path through site" tracking software?

is there anything that's got open source?

[amznVibe]

After looking around here I discovered that some like Nettracker Pro (6.0?) for drilling down through activity to view visitors' paths through their site. While its a decent analyzer, its completely closed source of course, it's very commercial and built for post-analysis only.

I've been looking at half a dozen analyzers and independant logging systems like AXS, WEBALIZER, AWSTATS, etc. and was wondering what other options are out there. What I am really trying to do is montior when someone leaves a site via an external link to trigger an analysis of their most recent history and either write it to a seperate log or email.

I could probably hack AXS to do what I wanted it to do but it doesn't really track path-through-site too well (it lets sessions span days if the IP is the same). Any other PERL or PHP answers out there that are closer to what I am wanting to do?

Thanks for any help! -aV-

[sugarkane]

Some interesting options here [freshmeat.net] - apache2dot especially is GPL, Perl, and looks pretty interesting, but I've not tried it yet...

[perch]

If you want to track a outgoing link, you need to use a redirect script on your link instead of the direct link.

For example, instead of using href=http://www.othersite.com, use href=/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?url=www.othersite.com

This way, the web server can log the outgoing clicks.

Then, you can set up a filter on this redirect script with your log analyzer and see the activities of those who clicked your outgoing link.

You will need to use a log analyzer that supports "Visit Session Filtering" other than "Hit Filtering". I use 123LogAnalyzer to do this job. It can finally give your a browsing sequence from the entry page to the exit page and the final exit click.

If you use "Hit Filtering" with open source log analyzers, you can first filter the hits on your outgoing links, then, collect the IP addresses of these hits, then use these IP addresses as a filter to get all the hits from these IP addresses, and then read the results.

[amznVibe]

Thanks to both of you for the ideas (already knew about tracking outbound links though, thanks to AXS)
Just when I thought I had read and tested alot of options, looks like I have even more to read up on. Whew, never ends eh?

[Mikkel Svendsen]

You can also track outgoing links using a Tracker service. I use a service that do just that as part of the reporting I get. It's not even expensive :)

Sticky me if you want the name.