AWStats is a web statistics tracking tool. It can be used to display traffic for a website, errors on that website, and many other useful items of information relating to the website. Take a quick look at an example here:
Well, this particular web-stats analyzer can actually analyze a number of different log files in addition to the Apache ones. For example, you can use it to analyze and produce data for FTP servers, Mail servers, as well as a large number of other web-media log files (such as Real Media, Windows Media and Darwin Media).
All of this means that AWStats can be an excellent tracking tool for a variety of different log files. Whereas something like Logcheck or Logwatch gives you a very small snapshot of what was happenning for a given services at a given time, AWStats can actually help track what's been happenning for that service as it has been running.
There are two concerns when considering using AWStats at your site:
1. It's Perl, and is subject to all of the associated security concerns.
2. The contents of your logs will probably contain information which you do not wish to share with the world.
For #1, AWStats has the ability to run offline and generate the pages statically. This is usually a very good idea as you can run AWStats from a cronjob or Logrotate and just generate static pages for you to view later.
For #2, you will probably want to protect those directories AWStats writes its data to with an .htpasswd and .htaccess. It would probably be a good idea to restrict access to them by IP address and range in addition to password protection.
