Puneet Varma (Editor)

AWStats

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Original author(s)
  
Laurent Destailleur

Operating system
  
Cross-platform

Written in
  
Perl

Initial release
  
May 2, 2000; 16 years ago (2000-05-02)

Stable release
  
7.6 / December 3, 2016; 2 months ago (2016-12-03)

Repository
  
github.com/eldy/awstats.git

AWStats is an open source Web analytics reporting tool, suitable for analyzing data from Internet services such as web, streaming media, mail, and FTP servers. AWStats parses and analyzes server log files, producing HTML reports. Data is visually presented within reports by tables and bar graphs. Static reports can be created through a command line interface, and on-demand reporting is supported through a Web browser CGI program.

Contents

AWStats supports most major web server log file formats including Apache (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or Common Log Format (CLF)), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format), and many other common web server log formats.

Development was moved from SourceForge to GitHub in 2014.

Cross-platform availability

Written in Perl, AWStats can be deployed on almost any operating system. It is a server administration tool, with packages available for most Linux distributions. AWStats can be installed on a workstation, such as Microsoft Windows, for local use in situations where log files can be downloaded from a remote server.

Licensing

AWStats is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Support

Proper web log analysis tool configuration and report interpretation requires a bit of technical and business knowledge. AWStats support resources include documentation and user community forums

Security considerations

The on-demand CGI program has been the object of security exploits, as is the case of many CGI programs. Organizations wishing to provide public access to their Web analytics reports should consider generating static HTML reports. The on-demand facility can still be used by restricting its use to internal users. Precautions should be taken against referrer spam. Referrer spam filtering functionality was added in version 6.5.

Alternatives

Some open source packages are considered alternatives to AWStats:

  • Analog offers a wealth of reporting options for a technical audience. It does not support the concept of a behaviour flow, usually desired for business analysis.
  • Webalizer is offered by many ISPs has a smaller functionality set compared to AWStats
  • W3Perl is an alternative that has features similar to AWStats.

    • A number of other open source packages provides features for same purpose than AWStats, including:

  • Obsessive Website Statistics
  • Piwik
  • Visitors (program)

    • The AWStats project provides a detailed comparison chart.

    References

    AWStats Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA