'Simple' Website Monitoring it's Visitors?

[walkingmac]

I have a question that someone out there might be able to help me with. I have a small site that I host from my mac and I am wondering if there is a way to monitor who accesses the site with out paying money out the wazzo or any money at all.

I mean, is there a way to, in real time, see who (either by viewing a list IP addresses w/ or w/out computer info, or an easy way to use cookies and have users log in and an easy way to set that up) is accessing my site. I have network monitoring software that I can tell, ya there is someone accessing the site, by shear network activity. But is there something out there that I am not seeing that will let me do this in a real comprehensive way, that isn't super confusing and will give the results I am looking for?

 

[ddtlm]

If your running apache, 'tail -f' the log file. Perhaps pipe that to 'grep' to filter out things like image loads.

There are quite a few programs out there that will parse the apache logs autmatically, or you could make a scripted web page (with PHP or similar) and set cookies, make your own logs, use databases for logging info and authenticating people, and so on until you reach the point where most anyone would find it confusing.

 

[Santiago]

Such information is already stored in the log files by Apache. To view it nicely, you'll want a tool like Analog, which is freely available from http://www.analog.cx/

 

[walkingmac]

Where are these logs?

Sorry, i'm an idiot i'm sure.

 

[walkingmac]

I FOUND MY SOLUTION

What I was wanting to do was just get as much info as I could about who was accesses and what they were accessing and be able to see that in real time. I have found just what I wanted!

GeekTool
http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/

Once I found the log files for my apache server, I was ablt to load it on here and then this little baby displays it nice and cleanly on my desktop!

• IP Address (whish I wish there was a tool out there to get info based on there IP Address)
• Time/Date
• and what exactly they accessed.

This has been something that I have saught after for sometime now and best of all..... IT'S FREE!

 

[Powerbook G5]

Congrats, nice to see that you found what you were looking for. Especially since it is free.