Sawmill

Sawmill from Flowerfire is a hierarchical log analysis tool for Windows 95/NT, MacOS, and UNIX. It is particularly well suited to Web server access and referrer logs, but can process almost any log.

Sawmill 7.0 generates hierarchical, attractive, and heavily crosslinked reports for easy navigation. Complete documentation is built directly into the program.

Sawmill presents an intuitive user interface, which leads users through every step of browsing a log file's statistics. Using an interview format, it asks questions when it needs information, so users only have to deal with the configuration options that are relevant to the task at hand.

The program's stats pages are full of links to related information, organized intuitively so users can get to the information they want with a minimal number of clicks. A powerful, hierarchical optimization feature automatically reorganizes the hierarchy to increase the amount of useful information on each page.

Sawmill can also add the contents of a log file into an optimized database, which can be incrementally updated as new log files arrive. Stats can be browsed directly from the database for much higher performance than is possible by browsing the log files directly.

On a moderately fast web server, Sawmill can generate complete stats (full cross-references hierarchical breakdown of a Web log by path, date, and host) for a small log file (a few megabytes) in real time. On a fast Web server, it can do this for files tens of megabytes in size. Using its fast-access database feature, it can generate complete stats for files hundreds of megabytes in size. By limiting the number of log entries of interest (using its powerful filtering mechanism), or by limiting the number and size of the database hierarchies, users can choose the best compromise between speed and completeness.

Sawmill is a single, executable program file (application). Once installed in a CGI directory/folder, installation is complete. The software is highly configurable using a large set of configuration options that can be set through the graphical user interface from any Web browser.

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