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Analog 5.03: Basic commands

Here is a list of basic configuration commands to get you started with analog. These commands should be added to your configuration file, analog.cfg, as explained in the section on Starting to use analog. We'll see all the possible configuration commands in later sections. Or you can read a summary of the commands which control each report in the section on Analog's reports.

Analog reads logfiles produced by your web server, and produces an output file based on the data in them. So you need to know how to specify which logfile to read, and which file to send the output to. The relevant commands look like

LOGFILE my_logfile
OUTFILE output.html

where, of course, you should substitute the names of the files you want to use. The logfile must be stored locally -- analog won't use FTP or HTTP to fetch it from the internet, so you may have to fetch it yourself first. You can read several logfiles by giving several logfile commands, or by giving a comma-separated list, or by using wild cards in the logfile name. So, for example, if you use the commands

LOGFILE new1.log,old*.log
LOGFILE new2.log

analog will analyse the logfiles new1.log, new2.log, and all the old logfiles. Analog will recognise logfiles in several different formats. You can read more about this in the section on Choosing a logfile.

There are a couple of other commands you need to know right at the beginning, not because they're particularly important in themselves, but because the output will look silly if you don't know them. First, you need to know how to put your own organisation's name and URL at the top of the report. For this, you need two commands such as

HOSTNAME "Spam Widgets Inc."
HOSTURL http://www.spam-widgets.com/

If you have broken images in the output instead of graphs, you need to say in which directory on your server the images are stored. You do this by a command like

IMAGEDIR /analog/images/

(This is just put in the <img> tags in the output page, so it's the URL of a directory, not the name of the directory on your disk. The images are distributed with the program - you will have to move them to whichever directory you choose.)

Next you will want to know how to turn individual reports on and off. Analog can produce up to 44 different reports if your web server has been configured to record the necessary data in your logfiles, but here are the most important ones. Try them and see what happens. You can turn each report on with an ON command, or off with an OFF command. You can also use the commands ALL ON and ALL OFF to turn all reports on or off.

MONTHLY ON       # one line for each month
WEEKLY ON        # one line for each week
DAILYREP ON      # one line for each day
DAILYSUM ON      # one line for each day of the week
HOURLYREP ON     # one line for each hour of the day
GENERAL ON       # the General Summary at the top
REQUEST ON       # which files were requested
FAILURE ON       # which files were not found
DIRECTORY ON     # Directory Report
HOST ON          # which computers requested files
ORGANISATION ON  # which organisations they were from
DOMAIN ON        # which countries they were in
REFERRER ON      # where people followed links from
FAILREF ON       # where people followed broken links from
SEARCHQUERY ON   # the phrases and words they used...
SEARCHWORD ON    # ...to find you from search engines
BROWSERSUM ON    # which browser types people were using
OSREP ON         # and which operating systems
FILETYPE ON      # types of file requested
SIZE ON          # sizes of files requested
STATUS ON        # number of each type of success and failure

The full list of reports is in the section on Configuring the output. Some reports, for example the Referrer, Browser and Operating System reports, will only appear if your web server has been configured to record the necessary data in its logfiles.

You can configure lots of other things about each report, such as how many rows are listed, which columns are included, and how the reports are sorted. For example, the command

REQINCLUDE pages

tells analog only to list pages, rather than all files, in the Request Report, and

REQFLOOR 10r

tells analog to include in the Request Report all files with at least 10 requests. You can read a summary of all the reports and the commands which control them in the section on Analog's reports.

You can have the output in several different languages, by using a LANGUAGE command. For example, the command

LANGUAGE FRENCH

will give you the output in French. The available languages at the moment include ARMENIAN, BULGARIAN, CATALAN, TRAD-CHINESE (Big5), CZECH, DANISH, DUTCH, ENGLISH, US-ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, HUNGARIAN, ITALIAN, JAPANESE, KOREAN, LATVIAN, NORWEGIAN (Bokmål), NYNORSK, POLISH, PORTUGUESE, BR-PORTUGUESE, SERBIAN, SLOVENE, SPANISH, SWEDISH, TURKISH and UKRAINIAN.

The following languages were available for previous versions of analog, but have not yet been translated for version 5: BOSNIAN, SIMP-CHINESE (GB2312), CROATIAN, FINNISH, GREEK, ICELANDIC, LITHUANIAN, ROMANIAN, RUSSIAN and SLOVAK. I hope that they will be available soon, and as soon as they are, they will be added to the analog home page. See the section on Configuring the output for how to download, or even translate, new languages.

Two other common things you might want to do are to alias files or hosts (for example, to tell analog that two different filenames are really the same file), or to include or exclude certain files, hosts or dates (to ignore accesses from your site, for example, or to do an analysis only of a certain subdirectory or a certain time period). For these, see the later sections on Aliases and Inclusions and exclusions.

As I said, these are only a few of the commands available. To find out about all the commands, you'll have to read the remaining sections of the Readme, starting with a short section on the syntax of configuration commands.

Go to the analog home page.

Stephen Turner
07 July 2001

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