W3Perl

W3Perl is an open-source, completely free, easy to configure and easy to install web-based application that can be used to analyze the log files outputted by various applications. Graphical and textual information is used to have a better view of the 'success' of your web server.

Features at a glance

Key features include the ability to parse WWW, FTP, SSH, CUPS, Squid, DHCP and email log files, create reports in the HTML, PDF or email formats, displays statistics from pages to hosts, hosts to pages or hours to years, as well as to create detailed reports about visitor's path.

With W3Perl you won’t have to insert any code into web pages to view statistics. In addition, it comes with various report features, such as the ability to create various filters, customize stats using configuration files, or view daily, weekly, monthly or yearly reports.

Another interesting feature is the ability to make manage your website statistics from anywhere, simply by using the remote administration interface with any supported web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer or Opera).

Under the hood

As its name suggests, W3Perl is an application written in the Perl programming language, which is also its only requirement. Being a web-based application, it can be used from any modern operating system, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows.

Bottom line

All in all, W3Perl is a powerful logfile analyzer software that can produce a wide range of statistics for your website, based on the outputted logfiles. It is a cross-platform and cross-browser web app that runs in real time and can be installed in minutes.

It is extremely easy to install, requires no CGI or logfile, supports many server types and it’s very fast, responsive and stable. You won’t find a better analytics tool!

What is new in this release:

• Countries maps thanks to jvectormap, a JavaScript tool from Kirill Lebedev
• Region maps with city location when the GeoIPCity plugin is activated
• Ability to output w3perl on a different logical drive than install on Windows SSH support
• More graphs (robots, status code...)

What is new in version 3.182:

• Crash when finding timestamp in the future. Fixed.
• SSH reports have been improved.
• Graphs showing the number of status code versus days have been added. So you can detect more easily attacks.
• Robots activity shows graph versus days.

What is new in version 3.181:

• Only three bugs have been found in 3.18. The first one is about logifle rotation with postfix. I forget to use my new extract_date_syslog function to extract postfix date. The next one is about computing hourly stats over the whole logfiles with daily uncompressed logfiles. (cron-hour.pl -b). It's really a minor bug. The last one was skipping agent field on W3C logfile format when parsing one logfile.
• Support for sshd logfiles have been added.

What is new in version 3.18:

• Menu uses now ajax to display so you won't need anymore to wait the next incremental run to get menu updated. Of course, it require a server running, if you don't have any, the old way of menu creation is still being used.
• The next big task was to rewrite the spec file in order to get an improved and easier way of packaging. If you want to build w3perl for your own distrib, you just need to edit the spec file and customize your default web paths.
• The last big task was to add support for SFTP and DSCH ISC (v4), feedbacks are welcome.
• Finally, there are still some bugs to be fixed....

What is new in version 3.174:

• Jqplot graphs can be saved in PNG
• Added support for ISC DHCP logfile format.
• Added support for SFTP logfile format.
• Missing headers on some files (precision = 4, several languages).
• More checkings in install.pl script
• PDF were broken when using jqplot.

What is new in version 3.172:

• W3Perl uses now an Ajax menu, it allows uptodate menu when new report is available. Of course, it requires a web server running in order to work, so the old static menu is still there for w3perl-win.exe package. As a reminder, with the old way to generate menu, you have to wait the incremental run to display all available menu.
• Referer spammer detection have been improved, you can now use keywords to filter the referer field (using the referer-keyword.txt file). Referer spam is a good way to detect virus/malware on remote computers. Most hosts sending referer spam are infected. I've tried to contact a provider so they can send a warming to their clients about this problem. Sadly, the answer was to block referer spam on my side rather than cleaning the source.
• You can also crypt your w3perl's output, I use it to display demo mode.

What is new in version 3.171:

• Wrong display on Page Search
• Search is now available without CGI
• Countries pie chart link
• Duplicate local hosts shown on incremental run (precision 4)
• Hosts files are not anymore removed on incremental (precision 4) : faster
• Empty jqplot graphs produces errors
• Threshold was not set in histogram plots
• Fix W3C validation
• Preliminary support for hourly splitted logfiles
• Output can be crypted (to hide email in demo mode)

What is new in version 3.17:

• Fix some issues with web admin (display / loadbalancing option / schedule ...)
• Jqplot improvements (limit to 1000 pts for histogram, ...)
• Users report show number of accesses/host/traffic versus time for each user
• Jqplot updated to 1.0.8 and logresolvemerge to 1.45

What is new in version 3.165:

• You can now switch to jqplot plots as all scripts have been converted.
• Graphs have been improved (min, max, average, and sigma were added).
• A few minor bugs have been fixed.