The web hosting provider STRATO offers web server log files for download from its customer login. For the last few weeks, the log files contain anonymized page views and site visits, as well as status codes and requested URLs. We will use GoAccess—a visual web log analyzer—to generate statistical reports.
Statistical reports using GoAccess
Web server log files come in varied formats and GoAccess understands some formats out of the box. Unfortunately, it does not directly support the log file format coming from STRATO. A single log file line could like the following
oromedia.de anon-134-49-51-213.googleusercontent.com - - [12/Jan/2026:22:44:00 +0100] "HEAD / HTTP/2.0" 200 22845 "http://oromedia.de/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 15_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.6422.141 Safari/537.36"
which contains a space separated list of information in this order:
- domain name
- anonymized remote host name
- date and time
- HTTP request type, protocol, status code
- bytes transferred
- request URL
- user agent
We can look up this information in the GoAccess documentation under custom log / date format. And with this, we can write down our customized log format to parse the whole log file.
zcat access_log_20260101-20260201.gz | goaccess --no-query-string --no-ip-validation \
--log-format='%v %h - %e [%x] "%r" %s %b "%^" "%u"' \
--datetime-format='%d/%b/%Y:%T %z' -a -o webstats-2601.html
This command line generates our statistical report as webstats-2601.html for viewing in the browser.