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Features of polliwogFeatures of polliwog
This page details just about all the features that polliwog has.
A note on feature comparisons
Some people have suggested that a comparison of features should be made to other log processors, however that is fairly pointless since the list will always be biased towards what polliwog can do an what others products can't do and as such has little meaning. A product will either meet your criteria or not, if you see features here that you don't know about then they are hardly selling points.

For those who are interested however, in short, polliwog can potentially do anything that the excellent External site, opens in new window AWStats can do but not all the features are implemented (either because they have not been requested or I don't see a particular need for them). polliwog takes a different approach to log processing than AWStats (and others) and this may fit your needs or not. I'm not going to try and convince you!
Features "probably" unique to polliwog
The following features are probably unique to polliwog but since I'm not able to audit all the other log processors I can't be 100% sure.
  • Visit focus - the statistics produced by polliwog revolve around the concept of a visit by a user. polliwog will report, per visitor, what the visitor looked at (pages viewed), how long they spent on the site, browser used, os used and location information.
  • Page title resolution - polliwog, via the use of a resolver can resolve the urls requested (and referers) into human-readable titles
  • Hit/Visit collections - you can define custom hit collections and visit collections that you can then use to produce statistics pages.
  • Integration with JoSQL - polliwogs integration with External site, opens in new window JoSQL means that you can perform SQL queries against the objects polliwog creates from the information in your log file.
  • Search Engine Searches - polliwog will detect searches made from the major search engines and format the information into a human-readable format, indicating the keywords used, the engine used and usually the results page that your link was on.
  • Site Areas - you can tell polliwog about logical areas of your site (site areas) and polliwog will report on those, also polliwog will report on visit paths (which is the movement of the visitor through the site areas)
Log file formats supported
Out of the box support for:
  • Apache Combined format (XLF)
  • W3C format (as used by IIS)
  • Java Application Server format
Support for additional log formats can easily be added.
Log processing capabilities
  • Auto-detection of the format your log is in (based on list of log formats polliwog knows about)
  • Gzipped/zipped log files
  • Able to access log files on the local file system or via http/https
  • Able to process rolling log files/multiple log files
  • Support for log files in any locale supported by Java
  • Support for any time zone, you can shift the dates/times in your log file to your local time zone
Statistics generated
The best way to see what statistics are generated is by seeing it live, try the External site, opens in new window online demo for details.
Customization
  • Can specify the timeout for visits
  • Can compress the HTML files produced
  • Can hide visitor IP addresses
  • Can resolve IP addresses into hostnames (this is not recommended)
  • Nearly every aspect of polliwog can be customized by providing custom classes of standard interfaces
  • New statistics pages can easily be added for either the standard information collected by polliwog or from visit collections/hit collections
Support for multiple sites
A webapp is provided that allows you to configure execution of polliwog across a number of log files for various websites.