Forum Moderators: DixonJones
My hosting company clears the log files weekly on Sunday. First, do I need to find out exactly what time they're being removed and download them a minute before they go:)? Or should I just expect some losses if I have busy traffic on a Sunday and download them whenever?
Next, If I download them each week and save them to my hard drive, will analyzers like FastStats or Webtrends be able to summarize the separate files for the month. Is that how that works?
Is clearing out the logs weekly the norm for a hosting company?
Thanks for any help :)
I don't use those analyzers. I use Awstats and run a daily cron job to update it.
I was handling my logfiles as you've described until recently. I just made a main directory, "LOGS" and then I made sub-directories for each week. Then each week I downloaded the log file into the corrisponding directory.
Finally I just set-up Faststats at the main directory then used Faststats time period filters to produce the results that I needed. The program will scan all the log files to find data in the range you've requested.
It works fine unless your log files are big in which case it takes too long for the program to scan them all.
Can't say for sure for WebTrends, but I believe you need to have one log file. If they aren't big you can cut and paste them together with a worthy text editor.
I'm thinking about going with something like FastStats...simply adding that into the price of each site I build from now on.
However, I'd like the experience of setting something like this up on my own. With all of these products, it does seem kind of like re-inventing the wheel.
