What's the best way to examine apache's access.log files?

Question

What tool(s) would you guys recommend for relatively straight forward (nothing fancy) charts based on apache's access.log files? Ideally I'd have something that ran on the server and had access to the directory and understood that the files are .1, .2, .3 etc and knew how to parse them (and had a web front end). I'm assuming there are numerous solutions, I'm not really finding anything via google... any advice?

Or perhaps you would advise skipping the .log files altogether and just using some other solution for usage metrics?

Answer 1

we use webalizer now. In the past we have used analog.

Answer 2

AWStats produces nice graphs for a variety of numbers.

Answer 3

I use webalizer. It's straightforward to use and seems to meet all your requirements.