Another option for some webmasters are software programs that can load and process Apache log files. One of these programs is Apache Log Viewer, a free Apache log file analyzer for the Windows operating system. The webmaster needs to load the Apache log file (either access or error log) in uncompressed format into the Apache log analyzer. The program will then automatically process the log file and display it in a more readable format.

The log file analysis software will process the log file and display data like IP addresses, dates of access, request, the Apache status code, size and country in the Apache log file analyzer.

A right-click will open a menu to copy information, find similar entries in the Apache log file or open the referrer in a web browser.

It is furthermore possible to create reports like viewing the visits by country, hits or visits. Some reports are disabled and will be unlocked after making a donation.

Another interesting option is the ability to filter by status message or IP address.

Apache Log Viewer provides enough information that provide a quick overview after performing an Apache log file analysis. The Apache log analyzer can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

This log files can become huge if you have a popular website. The current size of the Ghacks log file is 45 Gigabytes. If it continues growing in that pace the web server will run out of hard disk space pretty soon.

The first problem was to figure out how to backup the 45 Gigabyte file on the web server since I did not want to loose all the data stored within. The idea was born to compress the Apache web server log file first and then reduce it to a few Kilobytes with the echo command.

The Apache web server log files are stored in the /var/log/apache2 directory on the Debian dedicated server. The first command to issue would compress the contents of the apache2 directory into multiple tar files if the compressed file reaches a size maximum. This makes it easier to transfer files to another computer.

tar -cz directory | split -d -b 1024m - destination.tgz

Directory is the source directory where the Apache web server log files reside and destination.tgz is the name of the to be created compressed file. It is important to note that you might need to stop the Apache web server for the operation to succeed because the compression utility will stop if files get changed during procession.

The last thing that is to be done is to clear the original Apache web server log files in the log files directory. This can be done with the following command even if Apache is running.

echo " " > /var/log/apache2/filename.log

This simply overwrites the contents of the file. Please note again that some Linux distributions use another directory structure and that the log files can be located in another directory on the server.
This takes only a few seconds and the log file will be cleared from all contents afterwards.

Then it is just a matter of transferring the various compressed archives to another computer.