Hello I've started development of open sourced Web UI for gathering stats for Squid proxy server and need your help to clarify needs and resources. Where it came from: Enterprises require auditing, reporting, configuration check/visibility and statistics. I can say that most of these things are easy to implement and provide in different ways, except reporting and stats. Additionally, there are some requirements in functionality and nice interface not met by currently available solutions that I've found. Also, state of maintenance, future development etc are very unclear and Ineffective, but still acceptable or enough for _some_ installations. If you know something that can do all this stuff - please let me know. So, I've decided to write everything from the scratch, maybe will take some public-licensed part from other projects. Architecture: Starting point is gathering stats, then we need to manipulate and store it, then we can add some regular jobs (will avoid this) and then we need to view this. Gathering data Available sources: 1. Logs, available via files or logging daemon (traffic, errors) 2. Stats available via SNMP (status/counters/config) 3. Cache Manager (status/counters/config) 4. OS-level things (footprint, processes, disk, cpu etc) [anything else?] This part will be done by local logging daemon, I won't use file logging for known reasons. BTW, good starting point is log_mysql_daemon by marcello, available in GPL, written in perl. Effective enough to start and load any data to DB - it's simple enough and took for me 10-15 minutes to analyze the code, setup and configure. Data storage File-based logging is very ineffective and has several huge disadvantages: - Ineffective use of disk resources - Poor/no indexing - Logrotation/DWH/archiving - Not human readable, some parts need calculations anyway - etc For optimized storing and then viewing of data It's actually required to have DB. For first step I'll use MySQL, then will migrate the code to support PgSQL (and maybe others too) through DB abstraction layer. We can store all of the access logs and also have some dynamically updated counters, because periodic jobs are very intensive and require time too. I don't want to put counter-updating code on the logging daemon, will try to use DB-side for that as it's done in log_mysql_daemon. If someone will need this data for monitoring purposes not available via SNMP/OS through Nagios/Cacti/Zabbix/whatever - I see no problem to do that too. Web UI Technologies: PHP/CSS/JS/Ajax etc PHP will select data from DB and generate pages accordingly. TODO: 1. Collect information about UI requirements - what users want to see and control 2. Define all the counters, logging variables for daemon part required for implementing first needs, according to P1 3. Define DB-side counters, sources 4. Check data types and lenght for DB for optimization 5. Continuous improvement Any involvement: information about user needs, suggestions, recommendations, coding, ideas are appreciated :) I chose GitHub for hosting the project, will write project docs and plans there. Currently I am collecting a very detailed information on user needs. Thanks Best regards, George Machitidze
