What to do with apache logs?

Two simple things are easily achievable .

1. Loading logs into a log file analyser https://matomo.org/
2. Depersonalize

An example setup on Ubuntu is shown below.

Configure two daily running cronjobs

0 1 * * * /scripts/import-logfiles.sh

0 2 * * * /scripts/depersonalize-apache-logs.sh

Use import-logfiles.sh to load all server requests into the matomo database. Use depersonalize-apache-logs.sh to anonymize all logs older than seven days. Depersonalization is achieved by replacing the last two bytes of IP-adresses with  0.

Both scripts work on a default Ubuntu setup of apache2.  Apache  Logfiles are  compressed and end with ‘gz’. They are placed in ‘/var/log/apache2’ and start with the prefix ‘localhost-access.’