Sawmill - Universal log file analysis and reporting


	7.2.15

This page assumes that you're a technical user, a system administrator or webmaster or network engineer with at least basic understanding of web servers, web logs, and web traffic analysis. if you need a refresher course, start by reading the individual page.

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Sawmill packs a punch for large and small organizations
Sawmill provides more detail than the competition
Sawmill is not just a web traffic analysis tool!
Sawmill is an excellent choice for companies and other organizations

Sawmill packs a punch for large and small companies

If you're a part of a company, non-profit organization, educational institution, or similar organization, you can use Sawmill to show the traffic to your web servers (and other servers). Sawmill was originally developed by a small company that was unsatisfied with the available tools, so many of its features match up with the needs of small and large organizations. Some of the features include:

Support for multiple profiles, so you can have separate statistics for different departments, sections, or individuals in your organization. Separate web servers can be reported together or separately.
A built-in web server (or run it as a CGI script) lets you run it on any machine you want, and configure it remotely, and lets you or anyone in your institution view the statistics through a web browser.
Password protection and other security features so you can limit who gets to see which statistics
Built-in high-speed database with incremental updates (to roll one day's log into the database) and expiration (to roll old data out of the database, if you want) features. Option to use MySQL database as back-end with Sawmill Enterprise licensing.
Sawmill is very fast, processing 1 million lines of log data per minute on a fast system. With Enterprise licensing, Sawmill can use multiple CPUs, or even a grid of multiple computers, for extreme scalability. Support for MySQL as the back-end database provides further scalability.
Built-in scheduler to automate database updates, rebuilds, expiration, and more.
Simple and attractive statistics that you can show to the boss without having to explain everything (instructions on every report explain what the report means and why it's useful); but which also has incredible power under the hood for advanced users.
A turnkey option -- we can set up the whole package for you, if you like.
Support for many types of logs. Sawmill is more than just a web log analyzer-- it can also analyze your FTP servers, proxy servers (find out where all your expensive bandwidth is going!), and internal and external network traffic.

Sawmill provides more detail than the competition

Sawmill's statistics are superior to what the competition offers in their level of detail. Other tools will process log data and generate a set of static reports. If you want to see something that's not in the reports they choose, you're out of luck-- you have to reconfigure and reprocess all the data to get what you want, if you can get it at all. Sawmill's database contains a staggering amount of information, and its reports are live, so you can zoom in on things that interest you. All the details are there in the database, and you can get at them by navigating the statistics. To give a few examples:


The Problem:	You see in the statistics that a bunch of hits came from Spain yesterday. Want to know what they were looking at?
The Sawmill Solution:	No problem! Just click Spain to zoom in on Spain hits, switch to the "Pages" report, and voila -- you see all the pages hit by people from Spain, in two clicks.
Competitions Solution:	Big problem! The competition can't do that; they'll show you how many hits you got from Spain, or how many people hit each page, but they can't tell you this kind of detailed information without reprocessing the logs with a special set of filters. Sawmill does this sort of cross-referencing instantaneously and on-the-fly, so you don't have you spend your time and energy reconfiguring every time you want specialized information. Even more importantly, your customers will be able to get this kind of information without your help, which means less tech support, and lower costs.

The Problem:	You're trying to see if a particular page got a hit yesterday. The statistics show the top twenty pages, but you want to see all the pages; the page you're looking for got only one hit, or none, so it'll be way down in the ranking.
The Sawmill Solution:	No problem! Just chose "show all rows" from the menu above the table, and the table will expand to show all the pages that ever got any hits, even if there are 500,000 of them.
Competitions Solution:	Big problem! It's back to reconfigure again; the competition shows the top ten, twenty, or maybe hundred, but if what you want isn't there (or if you want fewer rows than you see there), you have to go back and mess with the configuration options. Sawmill lets you do this sort of thing on the fly, using links, menus, and buttons that are conveniently placed right there with the statistics you're looking at.

The Problem:	You want to see which paths visitors took through the site, click-by-click. At each page along the way you want to see which visitors left, and where the other ones went next.
The Sawmill Solution:	No problem! Sawmill's "session paths" report lets you see the complete click-by-click details of every visit. Starting with the entry pages, you can click to expand any part of the data, to see whatever you need to see about your visitors and the paths they took.
Competitions Solution:	Big problem! The best the competition can do is show you the "top paths," the ten or twenty complete paths that were most often taken. Sawmill shows you that, and infinitely more. Looking at the "paths through the site" view, you can see the broad patterns of your traffic flow in ways that a static "top paths" report can't touch.

The Problem:	You want to see a graph of the traffic of hits for last November. No, make that the bandwidth for November. Actually let's see just November 16th. Wow, look at that spike around 3pm; where did all those hits come from?
The Sawmill Solution:	No problem! Sawmill can do all this and much more. This is how you'll think when you use Sawmill. Look at the November hits graph, wonder about the bandwidth; choose "bandwidth bar graph" from the menu and bam! You've got another graph there showing bandwidth where there used to be just a hits graph. See a lot of hits on the 16th? Click the November 16 bar in the graph and the graph changes to show only traffic on November 16, hour-by-hour. Wondering where that spike came from on some particular hour? Three clicks and you can see the traffic for that hour only, broken down by domain, so you can see who it was. Or broken down by page, so you can see what they looked at. Or broken down by referring URL or domain, so you can see which ad, search engine, or web page brought you all that traffic! Your customers will love the flexibility of Sawmill.
Competitions Solution:	Big problem! Forget it. The competition can't do anything like that. The static reports they give you are the beginning and the end of your statistics; you can't zoom in arbitrarily, cross-reference, change the type of data being displayed, or show/hide graphs and data columns. Sawmill lets you do all that and more.

You get the idea. Sawmill's statistics are much more powerful than the statistics other tools provide, because the reports are live rather than static. Not only will your customers appreciate the extra power, they won't need your help to do all the reconfiguration mentioned above, since they'll be able to get what they want directly from the Sawmill statistics. Less assistance means less tech support, which saves you money.

Even if you decide to go with static reports (Sawmill can generate static reports if you prefer), Sawmill is still an excellent choice. It provides features for generating the HTML reports to disk, so you can publish them with any web server, and you can also configure Sawmill to send the HTML reports to your customers by email at regular intervals.

It's not just a web traffic analysis tool!

Sawmill can analyze RealMedia, Quicktime Streaming Server, and Microsoft Media log files.

It can analyze all common mail server log formats, including SMTP, POP, IMAP, antivirus, and antispam formats.
It can analyze all common FTP server log formats.
It can analyze proxy logs from all major proxy servers and firewalls.
It can analyze logs from Cisco PIX and other network hardware.
It can analyze tcpdump logs. And sendmail logs. And dozens of others!

Sawmill supports over 500 log formats!

Sawmill is a universal log analysis tool; it's not limited to web logs. You can use it to track usage statistics on your proxy and cache servers. You can use it to monitor all of the TCP/IP traffic on your internal network, or through your firewall, to see who's eating all that expensive bandwidth you just bought. You'll find many uses for Sawmill beyond web log analysis.

And that's not all! Sawmill lets you define your own log format, using a very powerful format description mechanism that can be used to describe just about any possible log format. Do you have your own special logs that you'd like to analyze? Have you written a custom server that no other tool knows anything about? In a few minutes, you can have Sawmill processing those files just as easily as it processes web logs (in fact, we'll happily write the log format descriptor file, and include it with the next version of Sawmill). All the advantages it has in web statistics, it has with all other logs-- you'll get unprecedented detail and power of your statistics, no matter where the log files came from.

Sawmill is an excellent choice for companies and other organizations

Sawmill features a combination of serious power and ease of use that makes it extremely useful for educational institutions, non-profit organizations, businesses, and other types of organizations. You can use it to find out where your web traffic is coming from, what visitors are doing on your site, and much more, and you can also use it to track other types of network traffic. Choose Sawmill for all your organization's log analysis needs!

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