Has anyone tried to use Awstats for generating usage statistics for a Liferay portal?
Can you share your experience on how to do it?
Aside from Awstats and Google Analytics, are there any other alternatives for generating statistics for a Liferay portal? (I can't use Google Analystics since it's a restricted internal portal)
I have never used a Liferay portal, but setting up AWstats is dead easy. Assuming you are running Apache on Debian, just apt-get install awstats and copy the default config file in the /etc/awstats/ to a new file for your vhost. All you need to edit are the LogFile, SiteDomain, HostAliases and DirData folders. And you need to enable mod_perl, obviously.
I recently set it up on my own site, and found this post by Sami Dalouche to be really helpful. I also blogged about how to set it up for Nginx logs.
Your best bet would be to use Awstats to parse the web server logs (Apache, IIS or whatever it is running on). If Liferay creates it's own logs, you can configure Awstats to parse custom log formats. See here for tips on reading custom logs:
As a side note, there shouldn't be a great deal of issue using Google Analytics internally (if I understand your scenario correctly). If the users when visiting your internal-only webpage have access to the internet, the Google Analytics code should still fire and log a stat. (As the code is running on the client - its only them than need access to the internet). We use this setup where I work to monitor user stats for our Intranet just fine.
With regards to AWStats. I've had quite a large amount of success with it parsing the Apache log files. The extra info in GA is quite useful though at times to grasp your demographic and average settings for user pc's.