# Webserver monitoring



## solar_illuminations (Apr 22, 2010)

Hi all
I'd like to monitor the access to my e-commerce website, that is hosted in a freeBSD dedicated webserver. However we are going to have Windows 7 monitoring the website.
Does anyone know a program that could do that?
Thanks
Sergio


----------



## psycho (Apr 22, 2010)

uh,wait.
You are looking for Windows 7 program on freebsd forums?


----------



## anomie (Apr 22, 2010)

In what sense would you like to "monitor the access"? For daily aggregated summary information / rudimentary trend analysis I recommend either www/webalizer or www/awstats. Both are capable of generating web pages (on your FreeBSD host) that can easily be viewed from your Windows workstation.


----------



## solar_illuminations (Apr 26, 2010)

My host computer uses freeBSD, but I will monitor the website access by a computer using Windows 7


----------



## solar_illuminations (Apr 26, 2010)

We need a program to monitor our website in real time.


----------



## DutchDaemon (Apr 26, 2010)

Login with PuTTY and run 'tail -f' on the logfile(s) of your website(s).

Or explain what 'monitoring' means...


----------



## User23 (Apr 26, 2010)

If "monitoring the website" means to monitor the services on your server Nagios could be interesting to you.

http://nagios.org/

/usr/ports/net-mgmt/nagios


----------



## solar_illuminations (Apr 27, 2010)

Thank you for replying it.
Basically we want to see how many people are connected on the website in real time, and where are they from.
Keep in mind that we want monitor those information from a normal workstation and we have our dedicated server out of our company.


----------



## SirDice (Apr 27, 2010)

solar_illuminations said:
			
		

> Basically we want to see how many people are connected on the website in real time, and where are they from.


Besides making managers happy this is rather useless. Are you going to be staring at a monitor all day? What good does it when you see a hit from Taiwan i.e. and 10 seconds later one from the U.S.? What if you get hundreds of hits _per second_? Your eyes and brain aren't fast enough to absorb that much data that fast.

Aggregated information is a lot more interesting. Tools like the afore mentioned awstats and webalizer are build for this.

If you don't have access to the webserver logs (it's a hosted environment after all), think about implementing something like Google Analytics on your site.


----------



## User23 (Apr 27, 2010)

If your company have a dedicated server it should be possible to monitor all services via nagios, analyzing the apache log files all 10 (or more) minutes with webalizer (to find out how many users from where are connected to what part of your website) and for a quick apache status view using the apache module mod_status. All this is running directly on the server and can be accessed via browser.

You could use ntop too, but this will show you only the connections to your server.


----------



## DutchDaemon (Apr 27, 2010)

solar_illuminations said:
			
		

> Basically we want to see how many people are connected on the website in real time, and where are they from.



That is a pointless metric. If I connect to your website (let's say an index file with 10 pics in it), I will make 11 HTTP connections of 0,5 - 5 seconds each. HTTP is 'stateless', so no one is 'connected' to your webserver for more than a second or two at a time. Browsers connect, grab one file, and disconnect, sometimes hundreds of times in one minute. Only aggregate analysis (webalizer, wwwstat, and such) will make any sense of that traffic. And you can monitor that from a Windows workstation just fine: use a webbrowser.


----------



## SirDice (Apr 27, 2010)

DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> Browsers connect, grab one file, and disconnect, sometimes hundreds of times in one minute.


Technically speaking, with HTTP 1.1, it can grab more then one file with one connection, still stateless though :e
Most modern browsers will make at least 4 simultaneous connections to speed things up a bit.


----------



## DutchDaemon (Apr 27, 2010)

Yeah, pipelining stuff aside  And lots of browsers can be tuned to open 16 - 40 connections nowadays, so the picture gets even more diluted from a monitoring pov.


----------



## SirDice (Apr 27, 2010)

Aye.. I do tail logs from time to time. There's something hypnotic about seeing all that info scroll by. Useless as a 'monitoring' solution though. Just a great time killer.


----------



## p3n1x (Apr 27, 2010)

check out apachetop too for extra fun

/usr/ports/sysutils/apachetop


----------



## DutchDaemon (Apr 27, 2010)

That's actually a funny app. More or less Rain Man's take on tail -f.


----------



## User23 (May 1, 2010)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Aye.. I do tail logs from time to time. There's something hypnotic about seeing all that info scroll by. Useless as a 'monitoring' solution though. Just a great time killer.



Yeah real men dont use a matrix screensaver! We just tail our logs


----------



## solar_illuminations (May 5, 2010)

Thank you for all answers
I don't really need to know here the hits on my website are from, but it is very important for us to have a real time idea about how many people are in our website.
The main reason for that is that we need to manage employees, according to how many people are connected on our website. As many people are connected on our website we have more phone calls and requests by phone.


----------



## DutchDaemon (May 5, 2010)

Replace 'are connected to our website' with 'are connecting to our website'. Your metric should be connection _rate_, not connection _count_. Again: http is stateless. No one is connected for more than a few seconds.


----------

