Over on Boing-Boing, they’ve brought back their traffic stats and intruduced them, along with A few notes.

I was interested to see that they also use awstats as the basis for their traffic logging. While my stats aren’t nearly as impressive as theirs (No, I don’t have 200,000-300,000 readers, which is probably just as well since the bandwidth bill would bankrupt me), I do have enough traffic that my stats can be interesting.

My great frustration, though, is with the “flat” statistics that tools like awstats generate. I’ve got a number of log analysis tools all running and am finding that they produce pretty similar reports, but that none of them allow me to do the sort of reporting I’m interested in without some fairly absurd configuration and/or scripting gymnasitcs.

I’m a big fan of drill-down analysis–the ability to filter my traffic on a potentially arbitrary number of variables. For example, I might be interested in seeing if there is a correlation between browser type and traffic to a given page. This is simply not possible with “flat” tools.

I’ve done some pretty heavy-duty work on near-realtime log processing and analysis in the past (Think archiving millions of maillog entries/day or thousands of network connections/minute). Maybe It’s time to think about “scratching the itch” and writing something that does what I’m looking for.

My question to The World, then, becomes, “What sort of web traffic data analysis would you love to see but don’t?”