Topic summary
Log files
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Logging (computing).
Server logs
A typical example is a web server log which maintains a history of page requests. The W3C maintains a standard format (the Common Log Format) for web server log files, but other proprietary formats exist. Some servers can log information to computer readable formats (such as JSON) versus the human readable standard. More recent entries are typically appended to the end of the file. Information about the request, including clientIP address, request date/time, page requested, HTTP code, bytes served, user agent, and referrer are typically added. This data can be combined into a single file, or separated into distinct logs, such as an access log, error log, or referrer log. However, server logs typically do not collect user-specific information.