I’ve done this many different ways but this has to be the most efficient way I’ve found to get hits by hour and I get to use the power of awk

The script sets the delimiter of : and counts the number of occurrences of the 2nd field which is the hour field, I add a little word formatting for the date file I’m working with and sort the output

Apache log format

awk -F":" '{count[$2]++}END{for (j in count) {print "11-25-13 hour "j, count[j]" hits"; total+=count[j]} print "Total hits="total}' /log/file |sort

and in an 1/8 of the time it used to take me mixing several commands I now have this output

11-25-13 hour 00 34278 hits
11-25-13 hour 01 28582 hits
11-25-13 hour 02 27139 hits
11-25-13 hour 03 219542 hits
11-25-13 hour 04 33612 hits
11-25-13 hour 05 29900 hits
11-25-13 hour 06 36313 hits
11-25-13 hour 07 48721 hits
11-25-13 hour 08 60941 hits
11-25-13 hour 09 77082 hits
11-25-13 hour 10 99376 hits
11-25-13 hour 11 142141 hits
11-25-13 hour 12 191163 hits
11-25-13 hour 13 218150 hits
11-25-13 hour 14 238086 hits
11-25-13 hour 15 236122 hits
11-25-13 hour 16 268599 hits
11-25-13 hour 17 224519 hits
11-25-13 hour 18 220107 hits
11-25-13 hour 19 223004 hits
11-25-13 hour 20 182992 hits
11-25-13 hour 21 180524 hits
11-25-13 hour 22 182396 hits
11-25-13 hour 23 173174 hits
Total hits=3376463

IIS was slightly different due to the different log format, again I set the delimiter to : this time I count the 1st field add different word formatting and sort based on the 2nd column
IIS Log format

sudo awk -F":" '{count[$1]++}END{for (j in count) {print j" hour", count[j]" hits"; total+=count[j]} print "Total hits="total}' /log/file |sort -k 2

Produces this output

2013-11-25 00 hour 59259 hits
2013-11-25 01 hour 55567 hits
2013-11-25 02 hour 51763 hits
2013-11-25 03 hour 44487 hits
2013-11-25 04 hour 43262 hits
2013-11-25 05 hour 46869 hits
2013-11-25 06 hour 33495 hits
2013-11-25 07 hour 24929 hits
2013-11-25 08 hour 20310 hits
2013-11-25 09 hour 18445 hits
2013-11-25 10 hour 17211 hits
2013-11-25 11 hour 22776 hits
2013-11-25 12 hour 26052 hits
2013-11-25 13 hour 36508 hits
2013-11-25 14 hour 38920 hits
2013-11-25 15 hour 43963 hits
2013-11-25 16 hour 45905 hits
2013-11-25 17 hour 41755 hits
2013-11-25 18 hour 42276 hits
2013-11-25 19 hour 41531 hits
2013-11-25 20 hour 41101 hits
2013-11-25 21 hour 44790 hits
2013-11-25 22 hour 45541 hits
2013-11-24 23 hour 18 hits
2013-11-25 23 hour 49687 hits
Total hits=936444

Good luck and happy reporting