This great article helped me a lot...
http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/server-usage/view-level-of-traffic-with-apache-access-log
I had created a set of prepered commands that I am using to analyze apache log:
request per hour
cat access.log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":00"}' | sort -n | uniq -c
request per hour by date
grep "23/Jan" access.log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":00"}' | sort -n | uniq -c
request per hour by IP
grep "XX.XX.XX.XX" access.log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":00"}' | sort -n | uniq -c
requests per minute:
cat access.log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":"$3}' | sort -nk1 -nk2 | uniq -c
requests per minute for date:
grep "02/Nov/2017" access.log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":"$3}' | sort -nk1 -nk2 | uniq -c
requests per minute for url:
grep "[url]" access.log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":"$3}' | sort -nk1 -nk2 | uniq -c
per IP per minute
grep "XX.XX.XX.XX" access.log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":"$3}' | sort -nk1 -nk2 | uniq -c
hopes it will help anyone who's looking for it...