123LogAnalyzer Review

Now here we are and here is the 123LogAnalyzer. I have had a long time experiences on different kind of log analyzers as a experienced web administrator and I have had coded couple of by myself so I was very interested of investigating the features of the 123LogAnalyzer.

I all started fine. Installion was very basic and straight-forwarded, and was very fast. Then I started the program. It opened it self upon me with very much of candy-styled design simplified view. After I had restarted my heart with refibrilators, I began examing this software.

User interface was, as stated, very straight forward and simple. Five wavy buttons and one very ugly "Buy Now" button. The user interface most likely draws towards beginner and medium-based users, but for me as I have experienced many software, I kept missing those nice pull-down menus and mostly hated that too kiddie-look on the software.

But how did it actually work? My largest web-server is external germany-based linux-server, so I could not use the direct "add log" button but as for my delighted suprise, software also contained "FTP download possibility" for log-files from the external server.

This is a good inclusion, but wall comes against one's face when you realize that for security purpose, you have only SSH connection, so I started missing SSH/SCP feature. The FTP log download feature is good, but if it would have support for SSH, it would be even better.

So to the downloading logs. I decided to download the whole server log which rotates in about 3-5 days (meaning, it compresses the old log and starts new one) .. And for my personal suprise also, the "superlog" size was about 90 megs. Well since most of us admins have DSL, this is not a problem, but I still took 25 minutes to download the whole log file (in that time I made food for me and the kid). As it is a OK feature still, a some sort of "Online-analyzing capacity" would be a simply great.

After 25 minutes, I started the analyzing progress. I was, as most of the software use, quite simple. Added the log, clicked the analyze, checked the options for it and went forward. Five mouse clicks I counted was all needed for analyze to completed.

The software generated HTML based analyze reports, which contained charts, bars and numbers - Lots of number. This is the point I cannot complain much. Although part of the statistical charts very some what ugly and little too plain for my count, most of the charts very quite good looking, specially the chart-bars.

Downsizes I can list were that candy look, that it includes search engines to the most results making geolocation results unreal, and as well as that it was a little ugly. Good part is that it is a simple and straight-forward.

The software generated ten different HTML reports, and using a frame sidebar easily created linkings to different parts of the report. While it easily competes with the very largely used other analyze software (free as well as commercial), it has easy features for fast and simple analyzing.

The market - analyzing part is one what is missing from the most log-analyzers I have encountered and 123LogAnalyzer has it.

Conclusion. Contains nice tools for a most web-administrators but for a professional like me you can also find most of the same results from elsewhere cheaper.