Logs and Monitoring for Apache Servers | Page 3

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Logs and Monitoring for Apache Servers

Monitoring Apache with SNMP

There are a couple of open-source modules that add Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) capabilities to the Apache web server. This protocol is commonly used to manage network servers and equipment from a central console such as HP OpenView and Tivoli. With this module, you can easily monitor Apache performance in real time, including server uptime, load average, number of errors in a certain period of time, number of bytes and requests served, and many other metrics. The SNMP modules can also generate alarms when a certain threshold or error condition is met, such as a sudden increase in the number of simultaneous client connections.

For Apache 1.3, you can use mod_snmp, which can be found at https://www.mod-snmp.com/ and supports SNMP version 1 and 2. It requires patching of the Apache core.

For Apache 2, you can use a similar module called mod_apache_snmp. It can be found at https://modapachesnmp.sourceforge.net/. This module supports versions 1, 2, and 3 of the SNMP protocol and can be compiled as a DSO, without the need to patch Apache.

A number of open-source tools and frameworks allow you to manage SNMP resources, such as the tools at https://www.net-snmp.org, OpenNMS, and Nagios.

Analyzing Your Logs with Open-source Tools

There are a number of commercial and open-source tools that you can use to process and display your log data. They usually take a log file, analyze its contents, and create a series of web pages with the relevant statistics.

The following are some popular, freely available, open source applications for general log analysis:

Webalizer: https://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/ AWStats: https://awstats.sf.net

Other tools allow you more advanced log processing, such as visually displaying the path followed by your visitors:

Visitors: https://www.hping.org/visitors/ Pathalizer: https://pathalizer.bzzt.net/

Monitoring Your Logs in Real Time

In addition to mod_status and the various SNMP modules described earlier, you can use the apachetop command-line tool, which can be downloaded from https://clueful.shagged.org/apachetop/.

This tool works similarly to the Unix top command-line tool, but instead of displaying the status of the operating system, it displays the status of the web server in real time.

If you run Apache on a Unix system and you have a website with low traffic, you can use the tail command-line utility to rudimentarily monitor, in real time, log entries both to your access and error logs:

There are additional programs that enable you to quickly identify problems by scanning your error log files for specific errors, malformed requests, and so on, and reporting on them:

• Logscan can be found at https://www.garand.net/security.php
• ScanErrLog can be found at https://www.librelogiciel.com/software/

Logging Requests to a Database

Apache itself does not include tools for logging to databases, but a few third-party scripts and modules are available:

mod_log_sql allows you to log requests directly to a MySQL database: https://www.outoforder.cc/projects/apache/mod_log_sql/ You can then query the database using the Apache LogView SQL tool: https://freshmeat.net/projects/apachelogviewsql/ pglogd collects logs and stores log entries in a PostgreSQL database: https://www.digitalstratum.com/pglogd/.

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