Goaccess yes!
What is it ?
Goaccess is a logfile analyzer that can be used from the command prompt, no need to install a framework, get an account on a website or any other ways to waste your time. Just download it and get to work immediately.
Working with Goaccess
Recently i have discovered this great tool that helps me to get some insights about the visitors of my website. I use it to see where visitors come from and to see what content is most popular.
I also get an idea of what pages are failing or producing errors. This helps improving page ranking by crawlers like Google, Yahoo and Yandex. I have submitted my url and siteindex to these searchengines and use the webmaster tools to see the results.
Hackers
What i also learned is that people are trying to login to all kind of admin pages like php-admin, tomcat and mysql admin pages. I run fail2ban to keep people of my systems so goaccess provides me with a way to inspect how things are going.
Marketing tool
From the overview of traffic hours i can see when i have the most visitors which can help to determine what the best moment would be to post new content. In a way it can also be a marketing tool or provide insights on performance issues.
Get it now
Just login to your webserver or run it on your local machine after downloading the access.log file.
Reading the access.log
Just point goaccess to the location of the file. In my case and to be able to use it with the x selection the access.log has to be in the "common" format. Check your Apache configuration to be sure (or adapt it).