Before one can understand the usefulness of Analog Helper, one must first understand what Analog is. Note that the following comments apply to Analog, the program which Analog Helper, well, helps.
Analog is free, multilingual, and very fast a web analysis program written by Stephen Turner which runs on virtually every major platform on the planet. However, Analog has an Achilles Heel: it is very difficult to configure. That is, if you want to use specific types of reports, specify which files should be considered "pages," or specify what lists should be sorted by (amongst other things), this must by adding directives to a plain text configuration file. The directives are obscure and good documentation on the topic is very difficult to find.
That's where Analog Helper comes in. This ingenious little app reads in the selections you make via menus, radio buttons and checkboxes, generates a Analog configuration, and (assuming you're using Analog on a Mac) initiates the analysis in Analog itself. There's very little to complain about in this actual process. It just seems to work.
However, in my particular test case, I was attempting to import and modify an Analog configuration file from a Unix server. This eventually ended up working, but not before Analog Helper rejected several directives that come standard in the Unix version of Analog. In addition, I didn't find out until later that you can't create a configuration file until you have selected a log file for processing. I guess I can see the logic in this, but in my case, this actually hindered my progress as the log file was not present on the same machine as Analog helper. I had to give it a "dummy file" just to get the configuration file created.
Which brings up another point. When a configuration file is created, it is written to the Analog folder and called "analog.cfg". End of story. It does not prompt you for a file name. It does, however, make a backup copy of analog.cfg in the same folder. But I should note that this doesn't seem to be the program's intended function. It primary objective to is save "sets" of analysis settings which include all your selections, along with the log file name that will be acted upon. These sets are, unfortunately, saved in some binary format. Using standard Analog configuration files as the native format would have been preferable.
One final quirk is that the "Inclusion/Exclusions" portion of Analog Helper employs radio buttons in a very confusing and nonstandard manne [see second screenshot]. Rather than using them to allow the user to specify one choice among many, it uses them as "tabs" are used -- to specify individual settings for various sub-categories in one parent category. This is much easier to see than explain, but it is most definitely a quirk.
Despite its faults, Analog Helper is a very useful program. For people that spend their many hours of their days dealing with Unix web site administration, specifically, ongoing changes to log analysis for multiple domains, $25 will seem very reasonable. However, people who plan to generate a configuration file once or twice, then never use the app again may feel uncomfortable spending that amount of money. Those people, in fact, may be better suited to finding a different log analysis program which is easier to configure. Personally, I spent hours upon hours wrestling with Analog before I stumbled upon this program, so the price is justified to me. Finally, Analog Helper is also a modern Mac application, taking advantage of Navigation Services and displaying helpful hints for virtual essentially every option in the application.
