Website monitoring

not really as you'd have to sort by ip and get the unique ip's .. google analytics is better for this.

Point this at your IIS logs
http://www.weblogexpert.com/lite.htm

Yes, awstats is a perl based script that crunches the data and generates graphs.  As others pointed out, using the IP is one way, though there is a limit deals with people who have shared connectins or are behind a proxy as all of those will count as a single "customer."

Hello,

Google analytic is best and available free. Alternatively you can install smarterstats if you are referring single website.

Regards,
Sanjay Santoki

Good tools here but my concern is reliability: is a cookie-based analytics tool like google better than info collected in the log? Or maybe it is the same?

Google analytics is the best IMO however both are free. Run both and see for yourself.

Google is missing out on a major percentage of traffic, namely the non-human traffic, the hot links, and the traffic that should be opaque to GA like shopping carts.
On the other hand, it displays an excellent view of the human interaction that it does record.

The question is why you need that info. If it is for marketing analysis then GA is your friend.
If it is for resources planning then by all means use awstats.

Hello,

Did you tried Google Analytic?

Regards,
Sanjay Santoki

I  know GA, but I am still confused about if the tracking is based on cookie or IP or both. And what is the best and if exists, what tool can do both, with complementarity, as best approach to monitor IT resources capacity.

This is the best free thing there is. In fact the paid version is the best cheap thing there is in my opinion. Try it. It's free. If you don't like it tell us what you don't like and we will suggest something else. Remember there is no "best" anything.
http://www.weblogexpert.com/lite.htm

ok but why a cookie-based tracking is (or is not) more accurate than the http log analysis, (apart from what @shalomc and @ve3ofa said)? My objective is to get adapted hosting plan to visits up and down.

@PM150,
when you say that your objective is to get adapted hosting plan to visits up and down,
do you mean that you want your infrastructure to be elastic and to be able to scale up and down according to demand?

On the contrary, cannot scale, that why need to know accurately the  average and picks of visits to choose right hosting specs.