FAQ: Sawmill vs. The Competition

How is Sawmill different from other log analysis tools?

Short Answer

Among other things, Sawmill does not generate static reports -- it generates dynamic, interlined reports.

Long Answer

There are many areas in which Sawmill beats the competition, but one major one is that Sawmill's statistics are dynamic, and its statistics pages are interlinked. Most other log analysis programs are report-based -- you specify certain criteria (like, "give me all hits on my web site on January 14, broken down by page") and it generates a single report, and it's done. If you want more detail about something, it's not available, or it's only available if you reprocess the log data with different settings.

Sawmill generates HTML reports on the fly, and it supports zooming, filtering, and many other dynamic features. You can zoom in a certain directory, for instance, and then see the events for that directory broken down by date, or by IP, or by weekday, or in any other way you like. You can create arbitrary filters, for instance to zoom in on the events for a particular address on a particular day, or to see the search terms that were used from a particular search engine on a particular day, which found a particular page. Sawmill lets you navigate naturally and quickly through hierarchies like URLs, pages/directories, day/month/years, machine/subnets, and others.

Of course, there are many other features that set Sawmill apart from the competition-- see our web site for a complete list.