I was deeply amused by the title. In my world using shell scripts to analyze access logs is the obvious solution and using google analytics is the exotic approach that you might come up with in very few special cases.
AWK & SED :) one of the better books I bought when studying. Often parsing a logs to find some things that other logging don't record/show for a manager. Often you hear the same phrase
'You can check logs like that, and you don't need a browser? How... magic....'