Find a better way to count url hits in weblogs

In metrics we parse weblogs and we extract hits per url. We have a set of regular expressions in Java to match what we want add the results to sql in meronense and then extract daily aggregates.

I am wondering if it makes sense to just count the hits at the webserver directly and stop parsing and archiving the logs.

@anarcat mentioned goatcounter or just hooking up prometheus to the apache/nginx.