activity logs - any ideas?

The web access log kept on seasidehosting.st sites is
probably written by the Apache frontend. Most website URLs,
when logged in this manner can give useful information
(and there's lots of log processing tools available).

I'd like to get an idea of what users are looking at
on the site, but the log, as is, does not yield much info.

I see two approaches:

1. Change my app to have more meaninful URLs. I know there's
    ways to do that in Seaside, but I've not tried them yet.

2. Instrument the app to emit a log in Apache format (to take
    advantage of existing tools).

What do others do?
Which of 1 or 2 turns out to be easier?

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Yanni Chiu wrote:

I do "1" FWIW.

David

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We do "2" FWIW ;-)

Lukas

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Lukas Renggli wrote:
Thank you both for your input. When I get to it,
I think I'll try "3" ;-)

After doing a brief search, I came across an article on
using Postgres to parse and interpret Apache logs. It seems
convoluted to do "1" or "2" (which seem to require roughly
equal effort), when I ultimately want the information in
some data warehouse. So "3" would be to instrument the app
to insert records into a log database. Hopefully, a record
insert, compared to a file append, doesn't consume too much
more resources.

BTW, the web access log on seasidehosting.st appears to log
the virtual host name in the first position where the visiting
IP address is expected. Is this an Apache mis-configuration?

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> BTW, the web access log on seasidehosting.st appears to log
> the virtual host name in the first position where the visiting
> IP address is expected. Is this an Apache mis-configuration?

No, it is an combined vhost log-file (see
<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/logs.html#virtualhost>):

LogFormat "%{Host}i %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\"
\"%{User-agent}i\"" vcombined
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log vcombined

However I realize that this might be inconvenient for most people and
log-analyzer tools, so the host-name is now stripped off. Tell me if
this is better now.

Cheers,
Lukas

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Lukas Renggli wrote:
> No, it is an combined vhost log-file (see
> <http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/logs.html#virtualhost>):

Okay, that explains why I was seeing the virtual host in the log.

> However I realize that this might be inconvenient for most people and
> log-analyzer tools, so the host-name is now stripped off. Tell me if
> this is better now.

It doesn't make any difference. IIUC, the first position should
hold the IP address of the machine making the HTTP request. That
would indicate roughly how many different users have been by.

But no big deal. The new Statistics link that's been added seems
to give me an idea of the traffic. That's good enough since I've
not instrumented the URLs to allow deeper tracking.

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