IIS Log Analysis with Log Parser 2.2

How to analyze your website usage? How many users access your web site? Where is the top 10 URL in your web application? There are many questions you may ask after you deployed your web application into production web server.

You may think to write a small program to read from your web server log files, it will not be simple, you have to spend sometime to study web server log file, programming it open the log file by date, aggregate the data, filter the data, order the data, accept input from users and etc..

Wait a minute, there is a better way to do this: -

Thanks to Microsoft, they have provided a very powerful log analysis tool - Log Parser, now it is version 2.2, you can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en. There is also an unofficial Log Parser support website at http://www.logparser.com/

The beauty part of the Log Parser is it combines the power of SQL query to query the data like RDBMS. It can be output to chart, grid, XML, SQL and other formats.

I have execute the Log Parser in my IIS web server to trace my web pages usage on March 2005 by using the following log parser command plus SQL query:-

logparser -i:IISW3C -o:Datagrid
"SELECT
date,
cs-uri-stem,
count(*) AS ACCESS_PER_DAY
FROM
c:\winnt\system32\logfiles\w3svc1\ex0503*.log
WHERE
cs-uri-stem LIKE '/myreport/%.asp'
GROUP BY
date,
cs-uri-stem
ORDER BY 
DATE"

It gives me the output in Grid:-

date       cs-uri-stem     ACCESS_PER_DAY
2005-03-08 /myreport/A.asp              1
2005-03-08 /myreport/B.asp              2
2005-03-08 /myreport/A.asp              6

Cool!