Provided by: visitors_0.7-9_amd64 
NAME
visitors - a fast web server log analyzer
SYNOPSIS
visitors [options] <filename> [<filename> ...]
DESCRIPTION
Visitors generates access statistics from specified web log files.
The resulting reports contain a number of useful informations and statistics:
· Requested pages
· Requested images
· Referers by number of visits and age
· Unique visitors in each day
· Page views per visit
· Pages accessed by the Google crawler (and the date of google's last access on every
page)
· Pages accessed by the AdSense crawler (and the date of adsense's last access on every
page)
· Percentage of visits originated from Google searches for every day
· User navigation patterns (web trails)
· Keyphrases used in Google searches
· Human languages used in google searches
· User agents
· Weekdays and Hours distributions of accesses
· Weekdays/Hours combined bidimensional map
· Month/Day combined bidimensional map
· Visual path analysis with Graphviz
· Operating systems, browsers and domains popularity
· Visitors screen resolution and color depth
· 404 errors
The web log files don't need to follow a strict format, except: the date MUST be included
between [ and ] chars, the client hostname MUST be the first entry in the log, referers
and requests MUST be included between double quote chars. Out of the box Apache log file
will work without problems.
It's possible to use Visitors with IIS log files converting them using the iis2apache.pl
utility distributed with Visitors (The utility is the same you can find at
http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/hacks/ and is distributed under the GPL license).
Note that logfile can be a - character to use the standard input.
Available options:
-A --all
Activate all the optional reports. This option is equivalent to -GKUWRDOB. Note
that --trails is not implicitly included in this option because it also requires
--prefix. See the --trails option documentation for details.
-T --trails
Enable the Web Trails feature. The report will show what are the more frequent
moves between pages of your site. This option requires the --prefix option to
work.
-G --google
Activate two reports about pages accessed by the Google and Adsense web crawlers.
Pages are shown ordered accordingly to the last time the Google web crawler
requested the page. The first page shown is the latest that was accessed.
-K --google-keyphrases
Activate a report that shows common search keyphrases used to found your web site
from Google.
-Z --google-keyphrases-age
Activate a report that shows common the lastest keyphrases used to found your site
from Google.
-H --google-human-language
Activate a report that shows common human languages used to serach from Google.
This feature uses the 'hl' variable of the Google referer URL.
-U --user-agents
Show information about common user agents.
-W --weekday-hour-map
Activate the generation of a combined weekdays/hours bidimensional map that shows
information about traffic in every 168 different hours of a 7 days week. Brighter
colors mean higher traffic. This is ideal to figure what's the best moment on a
week for a maintenance downtime, what's the target of the site, if people are
accessing it from work or from home, and so on. The map is generated as pure html
inside the report.
-M --month-day-map
Activate the generation of a combined month/day bidimensional map that shows
information about traffic in every 365 different days of the year. Brighter colors
mean higher traffic. This is useful in order to figure with a quick look traffic
trends and days with particuarly high or low traffic. The map is generated as pure
html inside the report.
-R --referers-age
Shows referers ordered by age. The 'age' of a referer is the date it appeared the
first time. In the report, newer referers are on top. This report is useful to
check for new external links.
-D --domains
Activate the generation of information about Top Level Domains popularity. This
information may be useful to guess the amount of visits from different countries.
Note that Visitors will not resolve numerical IP addresses if they are not already
resolved in the log file. All the unresolved IP addresses will be shown in this
report under the entry Unresolved IP.
-O --operating-systems
Activate the report about Operating Systems popularity, sorted by number of
accesses. All the common operating systems are listed in the report, while unknown
operating systems will be summed in the unknown entry.
-B --browsers
Activate the report about Browsers popularity, sorted by number of accesses. All
the common browsers are listed in the report, while unknown browsers will be
summed in the unknown entry. Browsers are listed by family (for example Internet
Explorer, Opera, and so on), and not by specific version.
-X --error404
Activate the generation of missing documents (404 error) report. This report will
show files requested, but missing, ordered by number of requests. The report is
useful in order to discover if for some mistake there is some file missing in the
web site, but often you will see bizarre requests performed by users or internet
worms and security scans.
-Y --pageviews
Activate the generation of a report that shows (and approximation) of the
percentage of pages viewed per unique visit. The goal of this report is to
understand the usage pattern of the site and the level of interest of the
visitors. For example, in a site that provides a number of pages with interesting
contents, the percentage of visitors performing a single page view per visit is
probably searching for something else.
-S --robots
Activate the generation of a report that shows user agents of clients requesting
the file robots.txt, with the exception of the MSIE Crawler requests. The result
is a list of web robots and spieders that accessed your web site, ordered by
number of requests of robots.txt.
--screen-info
Activate the screen resolution and color depth reports. Note that for this report
to work you have to insert on your HTML pages the javascript code you can find in
the README file in the visitors tarball.
--stream
Enable the Stream Mode (see the STREAM MODE DETAILS section for more information).
Shortly: when in stream mode Visitors will process all the log files specified
(possibly none, that's valid in this mode) as usual, producing the report. Then
the stream mode is entered and Visitors will start to read from standard input for
a continuous stream of web logs, updating the statistics incrementally as new data
is available. A new report is produced periodically if new data arrived,
accordingly to the --update-every option (default is to update the statistics
every ten minutes). It's possible to ask Visitors to reset the statistics after
some period of time using the --reset-every option. This allows to have a
snapshot of what is going on in the last five minutes, hour, day or week. Note
that --stream requires --output-file because Visitors needs to overwrite the
report for every update, so can't output to standard output as usually. If you
plan to use the stream mode, also check the --tail option.
--update-every seconds
By default in Stream Mode statistics are updated every 10 minutes. This option
specifies a different period in seconds.
--reset-every seconds
By default in Stream Mode statistics are never reset, but continuously updated
incrementally. This option specifies to reset statistics after the given amount of
time in seconds. This is useful to have a snapshot of the web site usage.
-f --output-file file
Write output to file instead of stdout.
-m --max-lines number
Set the max number of entries that should be shown in reports like referers,
keyphrases and so on. This option sets all the reports max number of entries for
all the reports at once.
-r --max-referers number
Set the max number of entries in the referer report.
-p --max-pages number
Set the max number of entries in the accessed pages report.
-i --max-images number
Set the max number of entries in the accessed images report.
-x --max-error404 number
Set the max number of entries in the missing documents report.
-u --max-useragents number
Set the max number of entries in the user agents report.
-t --max-trails number
Set the max number of entries in the web trails report.
-g --max-googled number
Set the max number of entries in the crawled pages report (google bot).
--max-adsensed number
Set the max number of entries in the crawled pages report (adsense bot).
-k --max-google-keyphrases number
Set the max number of entries in the Google keyphrases report.
-a --max-referers-age number
Set the max number of entries in the referers by date report.
-d --max-domains number
Set the max number of entries in the domains report.
-P --prefix string
Prefixes specify to visitors how a link should look like to be classified as
internal to your site. This option is required for --trails and will also have the
nice effect to avoid that internal links are shown in the referers report. If you
are analyzing statistics for http://www.your.site.com/, just use: --prefix
http://www.your.site.com
If your site is reachable using more hostnames you should specify all these, like
in the following example:
--prefix http://www.your.site.com --prefix http://your.site.com
-o --output html|text
Output module. You can use text or html. The default is html.
-V --graphviz
This option enables the Graphviz mode: Visitors will analyze the log file and
create a graph describing the access patterns of your web site. The information
used to create the graph is the same as the web trails report (that you can enable
with --trails), but as a graph it can be more readable for non trivial sites. An
example on how to use this feature:
% visitors access.log --prefix http://www.hping.org \
--graphviz > graph.dot
% dot /tmp/graph.dot -Tpng > graph.png
On Debian systems, the dot command is included in the graphviz package. The
generated graph will have edges of different colors, from blue to red to specify a
low to high level of popularity of a given movement from one page to another of
the web site. This option requires one or more --prefix options in order to work,
just like the --trails option.
-V --graphviz-ignorenode-google
Don't put the google node on the generated graph. Only useful with --trails
-V --graphviz-ignorenode-external
Don't put the external referer node on the generated graph. Only useful with
--trails
-V --graphviz-ignorenode-noreferer
Don't put the node indicating requests without referer on the generated graph.
Only useful with --trails
--tail When this option is specified Visitors will emulate the Unix command tail -f
--max-unchanged-stats=1 -q. You can specify the log file names to monitor for
changes, once new data is appended in any of the specified file, visitors will
output the new data to the standard output. This option is useful conjunction to
the Stream Mode (--stream). Files can be log-rotated because Visitors in Tail Mode
will always try to reopen the file to check for changes.
--time-delta delta
If your web server is in a different timezone than most of your visitors or
yourself, you will notice a shift in the reports regarding time and days of week.
By default, Visitors will generate output using the host's locale. You can use the
--time-delta option in order to adjust the output. Positive values will shift on
the right (toward future) from the given number of hours, negative values will
shift on the left (toward past). In the future this option may have support to
directly specify the output timezone.
--filter-spam
Filter referer spam using a keyword-based filter (see blacklist.h for more
information on keywords). If you don't know what referer spam is check this
Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spam
--ignore-404
When this option is turned on log lines with 404 errors are just used to generate
the 404 errors report and not used for other reports.
--grep pattern
Process only log lines matching the specified pattern. Patterns are matched using
the glob-style matching (the one used by the unix shell):
* Matches any sequence of characters in string, including a null string.
? Matches any single character in string.
[chars] Matches any character in the set given by chars. If a sequence of the
form x-y appears in chars, then any character between x and y,
inclusive, will match.
\x Matches the single character x. This provides a way of avoiding the
special interpretation of the characters *?[]\ in pattern.
For default matching is performed in a case sensitive way, but case insensitive matching
may be forced prefixing the pattern with the string cs:, so for example the pattern
cs:firefox will match all the log lines containing the string firefox, FireFox, FIREFOX
and so on.
--exclude pattern
Works exactly like --grep, but only lines NOT matching the specified pattern are
processed. Note that --grep and --exclude can be used multiple times, and are
processed sequentially. For example visitors --grep firefox --exclude download
will process only lines including the string firefox but not including the string
download.
--debug Show additional information on errors. For example invalid lines are printed on
the standard error if found. Mainly useful for developers and error reporting.
-h --help
Show usage and copyright information.
-v --version
Show program version.
EXAMPLES
The simplest usage, to be used interactively when you have a web log to check (for example
over ssh in your web server), just use:
% visitors access.log | less
That will produce a human readable output in text only. To generate html web stats with
much more information you may use instead this:
% visitors --output text -A -m 30 access.log -o html > report.html
If you want information on the usage patterns for your site you must provide the url
prefix of your web site, and specify the --trails option. The next example produces an
HTML report with usage patterns information.
% visitors -A -m 30 access.log --trails \
--prefix http://www.hping.org > report.html
Note that it's ok to specify multiple file names, or to provide the input using the
standard input like in the following two examples:
% visitors /var/log/apache/access.log.*
% zcat access.log.*.gz | visitors -
STREAM MODE DETAILS
The usual way to run Visitors is to specify some option to control the report generation,
and the name of log files. For example to generate a report from two Apache's access log
files you can write:
% visitors -A access.log.1 access.log.2 > report.html
Visitors will analyze the log files, and will output the report. Sometimes it can be more
interesting to have web statistics updated continuously, almost in real time, as new data
is available. In order to provide this feature Visitors implements a mode called Stream
Mode that reads a stream of logs from the standard input. The following command line
shows how to use it (but check the --stream option documentation for more information).
% tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log | \
visitors --stream -A --update-every 60 \
--output-file /tmp/report.html
Visitors will incrementally update the statistics as new logs are available and will
update the html report every 60 seconds. As you can see in this mode is required to
specify the report file name using the --output-file option because Visitors needs to
overwrite the report to update it. Note that instead of the tail command in the above
example it is possible to use instead Visitors in Tail Mode (an emulation for the tail
program):
% visitors --tail /var/log/apache/access.log | \
visitors --stream -A --update-every 60 \
--output-file /tmp/report.html
It's possible to generate real time statistics about the last N seconds of web traffic,
where N is configurable and can be from few seconds to one week or more, using the
--reset-every option. The following example generates statistics updated every 30 seconds
about the last hour of traffic:
% visitors --tail /var/log/apache/access.log | \
visitors --stream -A --update-every 30 --reset-every 3600 \
--output-file /tmp/report.html
AUTHORS
Visitors was written by Salvatore Sanfilippo <antirez@invece.org>.
COPYING
Copyright (C) 2004,2005 Salvatore Sanfilippo <antirez@invece.org>.
Visitors is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
This manual page was written (based on the original HTML documentation) by Romain
Francoise <rfrancoise@debian.org> for the Debian GNU/Linux system, but may be used by
others. Salvatore Sanfilippo updated this man page starting from Visitors 0.5, this
manual page is now part of the Visitors tarball.