Logfile analysis in R?

Question

I know there are other tools around like awstats or splunk, but I wonder whether there is some serious (web)server logfile analysis going on in R. I might not be the first thoug

Answer 1

It is in fact an excellent idea. R also has very good date/time capabilities, can do cluster analysis or use any variety of machine learning alogorithms, has three different regexp engines to parse etc pp.

And it may not be a novel idea. A few years ago I was in brief email contact with someone using R for proactive (rather than reactive) logfile analysis: Read the logs, (in their case) build time-series models, predict hot spots. That is so obviously a good idea. It was one of the Department of Energy labs but I no longer have a URL. Even outside of temporal patterns there is a lot one could do here.