I recently discovered GoAccess which is a great tool for analyzing server logs that you already collect in a visual manner. It’s also available on pretty much every platform and requires no configuration to get started.
Once you’ve installed GoAccess on your server, you can use this short script to get a visual report of web traffic in a single command:
#!/bin/sh
help="usage: `basename $0` [options] [user@]hostname"
i=0
for arg do
[ "$arg" = "-h" ] || [ "$arg" = "--help" ] && echo $help && exit
shift
[ $i = $# ] && break
set -- "$@" "$arg"
i=$((i+1))
done
file=`mktemp`.html
ssh "$arg" sh << EOF > $file && `command -v xdg-open || command -v open` $file
sudo sh -c "zcat -f /var/log/nginx/access.log*" |
goaccess -o html --html-report-title=\`hostname\` --log-format=COMBINED \
${@+"$@"} -
EOF
Save it as analytics and place it in your PATH. Then, using your SSH
credentials, simply do:
analytics example.com
That’s it. Your logs never leave the server and a dashboard view of your web traffic will open in your web browser.
You can also pass options to GoAccess like so:
analytics --enable-panel=REFERRERS example.com
The script assumes an Nginx server, but you can tweak it by just changing the log path to wherever your server stores logs.