I was at a conference yesterday at which one of the presenters discussed the use of log data to drive business improvement. Basically, they log the search terms that people enter on the website and then analyse the log to discover what people were looking for. The resulting information is used to enhance their search facility and web site navigation.

Logging user activity and then analysing the data allows you to discover trends and behaviours that may not have been obvious. You only need to look at the Google Zeitgeist to see what real world information can be derived from analysing the stuff that people are searching for.

I also find that log data is invaluable when trying to post-mortem an application that is running on a live system but crashes after a period of time. This type of problem is difficult to diagnose in a development environment where it always worked and the failure could not be triggered. In the live environment, the log files can be collected and analysed off-line.

inman