Raw log files are files that contain information about website visitor activity. Log files are created by web servers automatically. Each time a visitor requests any file (page, image, etc.) from the site information on his request is appended to a current log file. Most log files have text format and each log entry (hit) is saved as a line of text.

Here is a sample of log entry in Apache Combined format:

213.135.131.79 - - [15/May/2002:19:21:49 -0400] "GET /features.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 9955 "http://www.weblogexpert.com/download.htm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)"

Most hosters provide access to log files via FTP or control panel so you can download them and analyze with WebLog Expert. The program can also download log files automatically.

If you have your own web server you can find and change log location in the server settings.

WebLog Expert supports Apache (Common and Combined) and IIS (W3C Extended) log formats. It can also read GZ and ZIP compressed logs. You can find more information on the log formats here.

If you download logs manually you need to specify log file path on your drive. You can use wildcards like c:\Logs\*.log to analyze multiple log files at once. [ View demo]

You can also setup WebLog Expert to download log files via FTP or HTTP automatically. We recommend using the FTP mode as it is possible to use wildcards to download and analyze multiple logs at once in this case.

The program uses log cache to store previously downloaded log files. Every time it needs to download a file, it first checks whether this version of the file is already in cache. The program checks not only the name of the file but also its size and date to determine whether the file has been modified since the last download.