I have a working configuration for Advanced Web Statistics 6.9 (build 1.919). When I upgraded to the latest release (Advanced Web Statistics 7.0 (build 1.971), it did not work. I ran into this problem in 2009 and backed off. Now it is time to commit some brain power to fixing the problem.
Problem
When I tried to process a log file no statistical data was being collected. No error messages were generated even though many new records were processed. The data file remained very small.
Analysis
I set up a test environment in which I could process the data with the new version and debugging turned on. To turn debugging on I changed DebugMessages from 0 to 1 in the configuration file and added "-debug=10" parameter to awstats.pl command used to process the log file. This gave me all of the debug messages printed to the screen. I started processing a log file and interrupted it after it had processed a few lines by hitting Ctrl-C. In the debug output I could see that 7.0 version was having problems with the log format. Some values were parsed correctly and others looked like they were offset by one variable. In my configuration I was using a custom logformat which used a combination of IIS column names and AWSTATS keywords. I don’t remember how I created it but I suspect I found an example on the Internet. It worked for the last two years but now it seemed to have a problem with cs-username(%logname).
Solution
My solution was to convert the IIS column names to the corresponding AWSTATS keywords. Even after using the AWSTATS keywords it was still not parsing correctly. To get the parsing to work correctly, I had to change %logname to %other. In my log files, the value for cs-username(%logname) is a single dash. Obviously it is not important or necessary. When I look at the code, line 9027, I see a comment that says the regular expression code allows spaces to support Lotus Notes. As a result it puts two fields into one variable. Naturally the parsing for %other works correctly. After I knew what the problem and answer was, I could find the answer on the Internet. Here is someone else who experienced the same problem, http://www.internetofficer.com/forum/awstats-iis-installation-and-configuration/awstats-wont-recognize-logname-cs-username-field/. It sure would have been nice if Awstats re-mapped cs-username to %other rather than %logname.
