Funnel Web Pro 3.6 Review

Anyone who has ever administered a webserver recognizes the importance of having a powerful and robust log analyzer. The purpose of a log analyzer is to breakdown and produce reports of statistics from the logs that your webserver produces, and present them in a useful and well organized fashion.

These reports allow you to track users' habits, loyalty patterns, total traffic as well as your site's overall performance. The Funnel Web Pro 3.6 software was specifically designed for high-volume Unix users such as ISPs or high traffic webservers (hence the $1200 price tag).

Features

• X Windows GUI or Console interfaces
• Remote administration
• Scheduling for unattended report generation
• Unlimited virtual domains

Usability

One of the first great features that I noticed of Funnel Web was the great graphical user interface. The X Windows based GUI is well laid out, easy to use, yet still very powerful. The GUI allows you to quickly customize your options within a matter of a few minutes and can get you started generating reports in no time. The reports can be generated in 3 different formats, the most common of which would be HTML. The reports are clear, well laid out, and very professional looking. I was most impressed by how clear and colorful the graphs were as well as how fast the entire report was generated.

Functionality

Funnel Web is probably the most feature rich statistics program that I have ever come across. It is by far the most easy to setup, most customizable, and easy to use. The password protected remote control function allows you to control a Funnel Web client remotely over the Internet. This is a great feature for people who have a co-located webserver. All filter options that you enable/disable in Funnel Web Pro can be saved into a configuration file so that reports using multiple configurations can be easily produced.

Practical for the Professional

Although I was very, very impressed by Funnel Web Pro, I cannot in good conscience recommend to the average user to go out and purchase the $1200 full version. That would be downright ignorant of me. The Funnel Web Pro software is geared towards the professional administrator who maintains a high-traffic website and strives for accuracy in their statistical data. This software does all that and more.

For the average user who has a website of small to medium traffic or someone who just doesn't have the resources for fork over $1200 for a stats program, I would suggest the open sourced software Webalizer, which doesn't have all the features of Funnel Web, but it is free (and Open Sourced). But for the professional, this software is a robust, feature rich statistics program that can do just about anything you would need.