I came across an interesting banner ad on SourceForge for a product called Splunk, which is a log analyzer tool. If you're running an IT shop with multiple applications generating a pile of logs, this could be the tool for you.



Basically, it indexes your log files, and provides an interface that can help you spot trends and tag resolutions for recurring errors. It's free if you've got less than 500MB of logs per day to be indexed - after that's, prices start at a cool $5K for an enterprise license. It supports multiple platforms, including Mac, and it seems like it could be a useful tool, especially if you use a particular Business Intelligence suite that shall not be named that (shamefully) can't even produce a consistent log file format across its many applications.

Tags: splunk, log, analytics, freeware, statistics

Now that I'm actually making more of a conscious effort to keep content more up to date, I've decided to analyze my traffic a little more. The tool I've opted to use is Google Analytics.



While there are a few limitations (i.e., it can't track non-HTML downloads, such as RSS feeds and any files I've put online), it has one of the most polished dashboard interfaces I've seen. Perhaps enough to impress the likes of Edward Tufte. It is by far a better example of how to implement informative data than I've ever seen in any enterprise business intelligence products. It's scary how often Google gets stuff right on the web.

Tags: google, analytics, website, statistics, dashboards, tufte