Introducing a Java stats package to an application?

Question

I currently have a web application and wish to add certain statistics to the site. These statistics would be in addition to web statistics.

I can easily log certain events to a file via log4j. Is there something I can add that will investigate the data and format it in a human readable way (chart or table)?

The application is running in tomcat.

Answer 1

You might want to try JMX and a console that will let you see values at runtime.

Answer 2

You could create an MBean and view it through jmx console. Or add a class that handles the logging, and format it, and then in Log4J you could output that class only to it's own log file. You could then write a parser on that file, and view it via a webpage if necessary.

Answer 3

We log events for our web-shop in our database. Something like this

ID-----USER-----EVENTTYPE-----DATE

Then it's easy to create graphs with Google Chart showing logins, orders created, payments done with visa vs mastercard, files download last 30 days etc..