Web log Viewer

Web logs are access log files for web servers which contain information about the web access requests along with data about the web IP address, HTTP version, referrer page, browser type, timestamps, etc. the format used in web access log files is also termed as the W3C web server format. The W3C event logs for a web server creates records of the different elements found in a web page like image files, wave file, text files, etc. Other than that, these logs also contain page access details, user access details, number of visits on a web page, etc.

W3C extended log file format

W3C extended log file format is the default log file format used by IIS (Internet Information Services). These log files contains data such as date and time on which web activity occurred, IP address of clients that made a web access request, authenticated user name who accessed the server, internet service name and instance number, server IP address, HTTP status code, protocol version, site last visited by the user and much more.

W3C centralized logging

W3C centralized logging is a global configuration for FTP, SMTP, NNTP web servers so that all the web sites write their data into a single log file. The format used to store this data is the W3C extended log file format. This type of logging improves server scalability where large number of sites is hosted. By enabling the W3C centralized logging feature, every site on a particular server writes its log data into a central log file.

Web log viewer

A generic web log viewer acts as a W3C log analysis tool to process log file data written in the W3C web server format. In addition to data processing, web log viewers also generate dynamic statistics of the events along with detailed event reports. W3C event log viewers have the capacity of parsing the data, aggregating them and generating filtered reports through an interactive graphical interface. Web log viewer tools generally support multiple platforms such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, UNIX and Open BSD among others. Such tools track all the log file fields and combine the data from different sites and perform dynamic filtering.

Web log viewing tools enable site administrators and server managers to analyze the logs of IIS web servers and save the generated reports in different file formats like csv, html, txt, etc. by using these log analyzer tools, reviewing web server log reports get simpler thereby aiding in better network and server management tasks.