Log file Formats

Log Files

There are very many log file formats in use. Different servers (Microsoft® IIS, Apache®, ...) all use different log formats.

However, they are all text based and contain information about each individual access (or hit) to a web site.

A web site administrator can usually control how much information goes into the log file, as the full set of information is rather large.

SiteVigil includes a set of widely used log formats, you can set SiteVigil to automatically detect a suitable format. If no matching format can be found you can choose to specify a customised log format or submit a sample of the log to our support team.

Each log file record may contain the following fields of information :

Date and Time	Date and time of the record, possibly including time zone information
Client IP	The IP address of the requesting client agent (may not be the same as used by previous accesses)
User	The authenticated name used to access the site (typical access is anonymous)
Server Site	The web site name of the web server
Host Site	The domain name of the site being hosted
Computer	The name of the computer running the web server (for large sites multiple computers may service the same web address)
Server IP	The IP address of the web server
Method	The type of request - typically a GET to fetch information for display
Url	The URL address of the information being requested from the web site
Query	Any query string associated with the request (typically follows a ? in the URL)
Status	Server's response code that is sent back to client (200 for success, 404 not found etc.)
Req Size	Size of the request issued by the client in bytes
Resp Size	Size of the response (typically a file) sent to the client as a response to the request
Resp Time	How long the server took to process the request
Port	The machine port address used to access the server, typically 80 for HTTP
Protocol	The protocol used by the client typically HTTP1.0 or HTTP1.1
Browser	A long string describing the type of browser the client used to issue request, often includes platform information
Cookie	Any associated cookie value submitted by client
Referrer	Where the client's request came from, an external site or an internal page reference.

Some servers will store log files in compressed format. Site Vigil can decompress log files in .CAB format, .GZ format and if you have PKUNZIP (available from PKWare) .ZIP format too.