SAWMILL REVIEWS/AWARDS/CUSTOMERS
Editor's Choice
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review in Internet Professionell, August 1, 2002 (in German)
"[Sawmill] is simple to use and offers exceptionally many reporting functions....
Sawmill analyzes the logfiles up to the smallest detail. It even detects virus and wormattacks...
and presents them in vivid graphics. The program interface is self explanatory....
The usability is good; only a few refinements are missing.
The functionality and design leave nothing to be desired."
pick
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c|net review on download.com
"When it comes to log file analysis, Sawmill is slick and easy to use. We are
particularly impressed by the large number of quality graphs, tables, and charts
that can be produced. This is an essential tool for any Webmaster."
From the c|net newsletter:
"If you're a Webmaster looking for an effective way to analyze your server's
log files, then give the latest version of Sawmill a try. Sawmill processes
server logs and produces hierarchical HTML reports. These hyperlinked reports
contain a wealth of useful pie charts, bar charts, and line graphs that make
quick work of interpreting data from your site. Version 5.0.3 now sports a new
interface, cross-referencing features that allow you to track unlimited log
fields, and a whole lot more. Kick up some sawdust!"
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ZDNet review, June 12, 2000
"Sawmill is a detailed, user-friendly hierarchical log-analysis tool that
uses a unique interview format to guide you through the process of browsing your
log file's statistics. It then provides you with a wealth of valuable data about
your Website traffic. With extensive documentation, attractive charts and
graphs, an incrementally updated database for faster statistics generation,
support for nearly all browsers, and support for most log-file formats, this
application can offer you quickly produced, tailor-made data showing you how
effective your Website is. The main report screen has a nice drop-down menu,
letting you choose from a variety of reports and formats such as search term
statistics, domain description statistics, browser type statistics, session
statistics, and date/time graphs. For learning more about your Website visitors'
demographics, browsing behavior, purchasing preferences, and favorite times to
visit your site, this log-file analyzer can be a real help in improving your
e-business strategy."
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VersionTracker reviewers give Sawmill 5 Stars
"I love it and my clients love it! The level of detail you are able to provide with Sawmill is simply unmatched in any of the other statistics packages we've tried. The support is remarkable, offering detailed, thoughtful responses to every question or query we've had. If you must process stats logs, you owe it to yourself to try Sawmill."
"The author is very responsive to requests and bug fixes. so much so
that I kept postponing using the program till new releases stop coming
out so quickly. Boy was I wrong, I should have taken the plunge much
earlier. We are a web hosting company, and have several servers with
several domains/sites on each, log files are in the low GB per month,
Sawmill was very easy to configure and use and once I configured it
properly very fast. Support is superb. Highly recommended."
"This program is updated frequently and works great. Recently
I found a problem with the scheduled tasks under OS X Server, and they
worked on it with me until it was solved. They even gave me a $100
credit toward their software for helping them out on this bug. Great
customer support!"
- PC Magazine Review, November 27, 2001
"Sawmill is a detailed, user-friendly hierarchical log-analysis tool that
Sawmill 6 is a surprisingly feature-rich, capable, and customizable analytics package.
... For technically inclined individuals on a budget, it's hard to beat.
It outdoes ... its nearest competitor in terms of price, thanks mainly to a much greater degree of flexibility.
ISPs will really like Sawmill's virtual-domain tracking report, which
analyzes numerous client domains. The program lets you give individual
access to report profiles, so users can access their own reports. A
bandwidth report helps ISPs monitor each domain's usage."
Business/non-profit customers:
Bank One
Celera
Chicago Tribune
Conxion
Deutsche Bank
Ericsson
Greenpeace
Hewlett-Packard
Kodak
LowestFare.com
Lycos
McGraw-Hill
Meijer
Oracle
Oxygen
Pacific Bell
Philips
ProFlowers
Qwest
Reuters
Salvation Army
Sun
Toyota
US National Insitute of Health
Ziff Davis
... many others
Educational customers:
Duke
Emory
Harvard
Kent State
Ohio State University
Oklahoma State University
Penn State
Stanford
Suffolk
SUNY
University of Arizona
University of California
University of Georgia
University of Illinois
University of Michigan
University of Missouri
University of Texas
... many others
Governmental customers:
City of San Francisco
City of Suffolk
.. others
TESTIMONIALS
Harvest House Publishers
I have to say that we are very pleased with your product and
your company. I spent a long time researching log analysis software
and I had always used WebTrends in the past because of their name and
reputation. I am very glad that I spent the extra time to examine
Sawmill's robust features and functionality because, in my opinion, it
is a superior
product
to anything else out there.
Sawmill does things that I never could do with competing products.
The "paths through the site" is invaluable for our website analysis
and subsequent development. Since every element is fully
customizable, and because the filters are so powerful, I get a TON of
useful information
that
helps my IT team and my Marketing team. Furthermore, I am continually
impressed with the list of new enhancements and additions when I read
the release notices that you send out on occasion.
The amount of "bang for the buck" that we get out of Sawmill far
exceeds
the
cost of the license; and the fact that we can have multiple
configurations on one install is very cost effective, efficient, and
helpful. Then the fact that Sawmill will analyze virtually any device
that creates text log files means even MORE cost effectiveness. The
ROI that we have
experienced
thus far using your product has been outstanding. ...and what's
amazing
is
that we have not utilized all Sawmill has to offer yet! I wish that
all
my
software purchases were so pleasing.
As if all the above were not enough, you and your development team
have
been
super-terrific for support. We truly appreciate the time you have
spent to help us configure Sawmill. You guys have even written custom
config files that will allow us to analyze even more devices that are
not listed in the
200+ item list in the product documentation.
It is very rare today that such customer service still exists. We are
very
happy of our choice to go with Sawmill and would highly recommend the
product to anyone, both because of the product itself and the people
behind
the product. Please tell everyone on your team that they are doing an
outstanding job and that their efforts make it an absolute pleasure to
do business with Flowerfire.
We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial partnership with you
and your company. Please know that we appreciate your hard work to
help us maximize the ROI realized from our Sawmill purchase. In
today's tough economic times, the extra effort is truly appreciated.
- Dude Spellings
Harvest House Publishers
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
I would like to really thank you for creating such a wonderful program. We have enterprise version of Webtrends, but it didn't serve the purpose of analysing custom log formats like your program does.
- Sreehar Madullapalli
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Kusala Web Developments
We're a web development company. We currently host about 20 client sites on
our server.
We've just bought Sawmill. What a brilliant product! Within one day we've
been able to identify that one of our sites is transferring far more data
than he's being charged for so we've started negotiations on a large price
increase. And the facility for all our clients to pull down their own web
stats is a big value add for us.
Well done guys. Keep up the good work.
- Richard Wakefield
Kusala Web Developments
St. Petersburg Times
Sawmill is an
absolute breakthrough for us. With the log format change you made for
us, Sawmill enables us to easily and quickly determine which of our
spam filter rules are effective and which ones are obsolete. We were
able to reduce the size of our spam filters by 64%, and inbound email
that was, on a daily basis, being delayed from 5-30 minutes for
scanning is now being delivered with no delay, and without
compromising the effectiveness of our filters. Sawmill enabled us to
solve an ongoing, high-visibility, politically hot problem overnight.
Thank-you!
- St. Petersburg Times
Imagion.com Web Hosting and Solutions
As a premier web hosting and consulting firm, we strive to offer the
absolute best resources to our customers. And with Sawmill Statistics,
our customers rave about the detail and sophistication of our
reporting system! The value-add of Sawmill stats -alone- drives new
business!
- Brandon Elliott
Imagion.com Web Hosting and Solutions
Gippy's Internet Solutions
I bought a lic yesterday using Paypal, as I like the product so much. I actually
will more likely be running this for the short term on a Red Hat 7.0 Linux box,
and shortly moving over to a Solaris 8 rack mounted server for processing. I
will let you know if I run across anything else, and again keep up the great
work. I was starting to think I would never find a log processing product that
did everything I wanted... I have used several other tools, and so far Sawmill
takes the best of all of them and puts them into one product that is database
driven to boot...
- Nevin Lyne
Gippy's Internet Solutions
Prominic.net
"Prominic.NET is a leading IBM/Lotus Domino hosting provider. As an Application
Service Provider (ASP), our customers demand timely and up-to-date reporting for
their web sites in any easy to use format. After reviewing many alternative
solutions, including WebTrends and some home-grown software, we happened across
Sawmill. I don't think there could have been a more perfect match between our
'dream' solution and what Sawmill provided. Naturally, we were ecstatic!
After learning more about Sawmill, it became evident that some work would be
needed to make it easier for an ISP/ASP to dynamically configure Sawmill for
multiple customers. In conjunction with the Sawmill developers, we were able to
agree on a simple file format which would control Sawmill's configuration for
our entire customer base. The Sawmill team worked closely with us to ensure our
complete satisfaction with both Sawmill and the new ISP/ASP configuration tool.
I highly recommend Sawmill. Both the product and the support are incredible.
I can easily state in good conscious I firmly believe you will be 100%
satisfied! If you would like any more information about our experiences, please
contact me."
- Justin Kuntz
Prominic.NET, Inc. - Systems Architect
Plexus Web Creations, Inc.
We suggested that Stephanie use Sawmill's "paths through the site" feature,
in conjunction with its "session filters" feature, to show exactly which pay-per-click
search terms were resulting in sales. Her response:
This is by far the absolute *BEST* log software I have ever seen. What you
recommended worked perfectly. This information is priceless. You've
definitely made a sale with me. I'll be purchasing this software for sure. I
will also be sure to tell all of my customers that are interested in this
level of knowledge about it as well.
- Stephanie B. Sharp
President, Plexus Web Creations, Inc.
Chapman Net Systems, Inc.
Your product is amazing. I've reviewed about 20 analyzers, and yours is by far
the most comprehensive.
- Christopher Chapman
President, Chapman Net Systems, Inc.
Craig Schar, TCDA
[Sawmill] works like a charm ... even parses our separate url log from the
[Cisco] PIX. Best log analysis I have seen for the pix, beats the $2500 and
$4200 "enterprise" solutions, which I hated. We are definitely buying, thanks
for the assistance.
- Craig Schar
Network Specialist
Texas Commission on Alcohol & Drug Abuse
Aviram Carmi
Thanks ... for producing a really nice program, and for being so responsive to
bug fixes, requests, etc. I am only sorry I did not take the plunge and switch
to Sawmill earlier...
- Aviram Carmi
Mike Romanello
"Sawmill is a nice, full featured program and provides everything we were
looking for in stats analysis. We intend to buy a full version...."
- Mike Romanello
NationalGayLobby.Org
Fred Hicinbothem
"Ya know ... this thing is just plain kewl. I've got about 120 million hits in my
databases now and I can examine the data in real-time as quickly as I can click
mouse buttons! I can drill down however I like or view the data in different
ways at different times. The presentation is excellent and I even know a few
marketing folks who enjoy the Sawmill reports pages! Best of all, I can get to
the data from the UNIX shell quickly and easily if I need to put together some
targeted reports. Another feature I use is the ability to display arbitrary
application data using the tool - this isn't just for access logs! Finally, I
can't say enough about the responsiveness of the Sawmill staff, and Greg in
particular - keep up the good work!
- Fred Hicinbothem
(www.catalog.att.com/cmd; www.e-care.att.com)
Garry Dolley
"First off, let me say that Sawmill is by leaps and bounds THE BEST statistical
logging program EVER. I'm a Systems Admin at a web hosting company and I live in
UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD, etc...). I'm very used to going through many steps to
install any software that we need. However, I was absolutely AMAZED at how
SIMPLE Sawmill was to install. Great job."
- Garry Dolley
Lukas Lussar
I really like [ the MacOS version of ] Sawmill. The setup is quite easy and the
results are really great. Clearly one of the best log analysers! And I'm very
pleased with the fast and helpful support, too.
-Lukas Lusser
Mike Larsen
(Mike Larsen purchased Sawmill for his company. Here's what he wrote about it in
a discussion group posting:)
Check out Sawmill at:
It's *exceptional* (and it even looks pretty). It runs as a cgi program, but
you can set up databases with different filters for the program to write to.
I've implemented it where I work, and we're involved in beta testing version
3.0.
I've made two requests for enhancements; one for a simple error log analysis
format, and one for tracking hourly usage over the course of a 24 hour period.
The error log was simple, and Greg (the author) had it ready within 12 hours,
for all supported platforms (there's a list on the web site). The hourly
tracking was a fairly extensive rewrite, and he had it ready for testing within
5 days.
It'll handle log files for Apache, Netscape, a Mac server (can't remember the
name), and another I've never heard off. It has a nice feature for presenting a
limited interface for security purposes, it's almost infinitely customizable via
a browser interface, and the online documentation is as good as the product;
Sawmill's online doc is complete and well organized.
Check the web site. Again, it's superb, and the author is aggressive about
implementing improvements. I'd be interested in getting other folks' impressions
of it off-line.
I'm not associated with Flowerfire in any way other than being an ecstatic
customer.
- Mike Larsen
Chuck Agol
(Chuck Agol purchased Sawmill for his company. Chuck has made several feature
requests, which we've happily implemented. Here are excerpts from his emails to
us:)
I've placed my order via your site and am totally digging your product....
I don't have words for your helpfulness! ...
You've been unbelievably kind and helpful! ...
I truly think it's the best agent analyzer on the market....
This is everything I could dream for in a stats program!
Chuck Agol
President
Uncommon Scents Inc.
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