All log analyzers do almost the same. They take your log file, parse it and build reports by grouping or filtering the extracted data. Then you explore resulting tables or charts trying to figure out what is going on your web site, proxy server, firewall etc.

Good log analyzers create "multilevel" and cross-linked reports. For example, when you see a page views report, you can click a certain page name and see visitors who accessed this page on any day, or a list of referrers that led visitors to this page. Normally, all these reports are pre-built and statically linked.

But only the best log analyzers give you the full freedom of exploring the data. Web Log Explorer from Exacttrend is definitely one of the best. This program creates dynamic reports on-the-fly. It allows you to dig as deep into your log files as you need to. Simply right-click a row in any report, whether it's a page, a host, a user, a search engine or anything else and choose from a list of sub-reports available for this item. For example, in a page views report you can select a certain page and get a list of its visitors, their paths across the site, countries and cities these visitors are from, referring sites, keywords that the visitors used in search engines to find this page and much more...

Web Log Explorer supports more than 25 log file formats. It was tested with all popular web server programs, web proxies, firewalls and media broadcasters. Needless to say, it can recognize log file formats automatically, extract compressed log files, process multiple log files and download log files from various sources: Web, FTP. ODBC compliant databases, etc.

Web Log Explorer also allows you to filter visits by search engine robots. You can switch the program into "All requests", "Without spiders" and "Spiders only" modes with the click of a button.