123 LogAnalyzer Review

123LogAnalzyer doesn't support multiple servers serving the same Web site, but it's perfect for at-home enthusiasts or small organizations looking for quick, simple views of the activity on their sites. This inexpensive client-side application is also a good solution for hosted Web sites, where the logs are available for download and analysis. 123LogAnalyzer is easy to use and even easier to set up and run. But while it's compact and speedy, this bare-bones solution lacks flexibility.

Installation requires nothing more than double-clicking on the setup icon. The only set-up option is the location of the application. After the installer completes, you are ready to begin crunching logs. You do this through the program's simple interface—a handful of action buttons that require no real technical knowledge.

123LogAnalyzer provides two methods of retrieving your log files: manually adding the individual files via a one-step dialog box or retrieving the logs from a remote location via FTP or file transfer over HTTP.

Because the product is a client-side application, each analysis must be triggered manually. No scheduling or automation of the application is possible. Though it's a Windows-based program, 123LogAnalyzer can read the major log file formats from both Unix and Windows platforms.

One useful feature is the program's ability to analyze log file archives (such as ZIP or GZ) without extracting them to your local drive. If you set up the product to retrieve and analyze compressed logs from a remote location, you'll save some download time and hard drive space on your client machine. 123LogAnalyzer does not, however, allow multiple log files to be in the same archive.

Reports show up via an HTML interface that opens when the analysis engine completes its work. The reports are enough to give the general user a good perspective on what people are doing on a Web site. They're available for most of the basic Web site statistics, from the number of visitors' browsers and platforms to the number of unique visitors. The Server Error report provides useful information on the number of requests that resulted in something other than the standard acceptance code of 200. The Search Engine Performance report provides an informative view into the number of referrals from several top search engines.

The Advanced Visitor filters allow for a number of different reporting options, from the usage of an individual page or file to determining the impact of a specific page as an entry point for your Web site. Though the Advanced Visitor filter does allow some custom tailoring to the analysis, such as specific page visits and visitor exclusion, the product does not provide the extensibility of WebTrends Log Analyzer 7.0, or even 123LogAnalyzer's closest price competitor, Sawmill 6.

If you want to save your reports, you must specify a different directory for each analysis. Otherwise you'll overwrite the reports in the next analysis.