Downloading Your Web Logs
To make it easy to collect your raw web logs, Top Drop can automatically connect to your server, and download the latest files. If you configure a Top Drop button for web logs, you will see a form that looks like this:
Decide where to save your weblogs
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| %Y | The 4 digit year |
| %y | The 2 digit year |
| %m | The 2 digit month number |
| %d | The 2 digit day of the month |
| %w | The day of the week (1-7) |
| %W | The ISO week number |
You can specify that you want to save your files anywhere on your hard disk. You can also use some additional variables in your filename, to make it easy to categorize where your files are saved. These variables are detailed on the right.
When you click one of the Go! buttons, TopDrop will connect to your server using the user name and the password you entered to connect to your web server.
It will then search for the files described in the row the button is in. It will also try to collect as many files as you specify that are not already on your disk. So, if you have chosen the Daily logs, the program will cycle through the last N days from today backward in time, and try to download and open the logs.
Where does my server store its logs
You'll have to find this out from your host, however many store their daily logs in a folder named logs, and then add additional bits to the filename, which contain the day of the log, and perhaps the week.
The way we've configured the program by default is to assume that daily logs are in the form:
ftp://ftp.example.com/logs/access.log.%W.%w.gz
i.e., they are in a directory of your server named logs, in a file named access.log.13.3.gz if the log file
is in the 13th week of the year on a Wednesday.
In addition, we allow you to fetch your logs with the http protocol as well as by FTP. On our servers, the current log is updated every 2 minutes in a file that is always named /logs/access.log.13.3
When you connect with the HTTP protocol, TopDrop only downloads the portion of the file that has not already been downloaded onto your PC.
In the event that your server does not give you convenient access to your most recent log or support partial downloads by HTTP, we've also included a PHP script that can help. It is copied into the programs main directory, and is named access_log.php. If you copy this file to your web server, it will allow you to fetch your logs. We recommend you put this file in a password protected folder.
My server is in another time zone
To have TopDrop adjust the time it fetches to the time where your server is located, simply enter the number of minutes between your location and your server. If for example your servers are in Germany while you are located in the UK, you would enter 60 minutes, because the time at your server is one hour later than in England.
Viewing old Log Files
To view an old log file, simply find it with Windows Explorer, and drag and drop the file onto any log analysis button in TopDrop. The file will automatically be decompressed (if necessary) and analyzed for you.
Cleaning up
Top drop continues to add the files to the location you have stored them to, and never deletes them. You'll need to periodically remove or backup your log files.