Log analysis?

There was a great post by one of the members on syndk8 forums about stats tools and it made me think of how people’s attitude towards site logs changes with regard to the number of sites they have to handle.

Back when I was completely white hat, I used to have just a couple sites and one of my favourite activities was reading raw logs. I mean daily. It was an interesting read and it gave you insights on things you’d never know with any log analysis tools. But once you miss a few days or add a few more sites, it starts getting too time consuming, so then I switched to Statcounter.

At first, with only a few sites and still quite a lot of time on my hands, I used to go to every tab in Statcounter stats and read it all carefully for every site I owned and ran. But as sites kept adding, I stopped going so deep into every detail.

Right now, with still more sites, the tendency is to just cast a quick glance on the daily number of visitors and if I find something suspicious maybe look where they came from. As the sites keep adding, is the next step to just say f*ck the logs?

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