Re: Tools for better viewing Apache access logs?

"Mark A. Craig" <mark.a.craig@xxxxxxxxx> · Thu, 03 May 2007 23:57:31 -0700

Yep, I've wound up finding and downloading nearly a dozen alleged log 

analyzers, but most of them seem to do things I don't want while not 

doing what I do want, which is a simple columnar display of the logs, 

perhaps with a few filtering or sorting choices.  I actually screwed 

around with importing the log into Excel, which got me closer to what I 

want (at the moment) than any of those analyzers I've installed so far.  

One of them even made things MORE confused, because it functioned 

through the browser by hitting the server and adding dozens of new 

irrelevant hits to the Apache log.  What's that old science cliche about 

the act of observation altering the subject?  >:-(

Mark

Joshua Slive wrote:

On 5/3/07, Mark A. Craig <mark.a.craig@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks again to those who helped me get past my BSOD problem and finally
put Apache to use.  Now that I'm using it, I'm wondering if there's some
tool that exists to enhance and restructure the display of information
in Apache's access log?  I'd like to view the log with a hostname and
more column-structured, in particular.  The previous server I was using
included hostnames and displayed everything in well-ordered columns, and
I found those to be a very helpful features.  Is there a viewing utility
for Apache that can display the log in (configurable) columns and
resolve the IP addresses to hostnames and display those as well?

That hostname feature was how I immediately knew when the U.S.
government had been snooping on my blog:
150.148.0.27/wallwhale-pub.fda.gov.  ;-)

If you want to see what is happening on your server at a particular
moment, check mod_status and the server-status handler.

If you want to see hostnames, you'll need to turn HostnameLookups On,
but that will have performance effects.

If what you want is just to better analyze requests to your server in
general, you should use a log analysis tool. Try googling for "Apache
log analysis" and similar...

Joshua.

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