Log Parser saves the day (again)!

If you're like me and work for a somewhat smaller organization (IT wise at least), you too probably wear multiple hats. In addition to development tasks I often find myself asked to provide stats and data from our web logs that don't exactly show up in standard log analysis tools.

Today the request was to determine what IP addresses accessed a particular directory during a particular period in time. This is something our log analysis tool definitely does not do. Enter Microsoft's Log Parser. Log Parser is a command line tool from Microsoft that allows you to use SQL to filter a large variety of text file formats (including IIS and ColdFusion logs), and output the results in a number of formats. Two quick SQL statements later and I have a CSV file with the IP addresses in question. If you are a Windows user who finds themselves performing these types of tasks, you should seriously consider adding Log Parser to your toolkit.

For information on using Log Parser, check out Charlie Arehart's excellent article from the October 2006 CFDJ. To download it, go to Microsoft's web site and do a search on Log Parser. (I find that anytime I put up a link directly to a Microsoft resource, they end up moving it on me.)

Labels: ColdFusion, IIS, log parser, Microsoft, tools

posted by Luis - 0 comments