Access log

When referring to a web page, an access log is a file or group of files containing a list of each of the file names accessed on a server. Generally, most servers will log the IP address, date, time, the file being requested, the browser, the operating system and version, and/or the referring page. Below is an example of what an entry in the access log may look like. 

1.1.1.1 - - [22/Feb/2005:17:32:27 -0800] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 1406 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1" "www.computerhope.com"

Often most users and people running a basic web site will not need access to the raw access log files because many web hosts will provide a report or chart displaying an overview of a site's statistics. However, users who want to display more advanced reports need to determine who or what is accessing a specific file on their server or need any more information that is not provided by the generic chart will need to request that the web host grant them access to the raw access logs.

It is important to realize that users who get a lot of traffic on their website will have large daily raw access logs, which may cause disk space related issues. For example, Computer Hope's daily log exceeds 500MB. 

Also see: Network definitions