By Shane Jester,
Campus Web Administrator
Do
you run an Apache Webserver? If so, are you tired of the
consistent hassle of managing log files and generating statistics?
I recently began playing with an Apache module that may make your
life much easier. It is called mod_log_sql and you can read
about it and download it from here:
http://www.grubbybaby.com/mod_log_sql/Mod_log_sql is an Apache module that
allows you to log your Apache traffic to an SQL server. It
used to be called mod_log_mysql, but it is no longer limited to
just the MySQL database. To get it running you simply need
to have an sql server running (it can be on the localhost or a
completely separate machine) and install the module in your Apache
server. The module comes with scripts that allow you to
setup the tables on the fly for your server, or for those who like
to get their hands dirty, there are specific directions on
manually setting up the tables.
What are the advantages to using this module?
There are many advantages. The first advantage is the
ease of managing the apache log files. The module allows you
to log traffic simultaneously to the standard log files as well as
the sql server. This means that I can more regularly rotate
my apache log files to keep them under a reasonable file size
without the headache of maintaining the data for end-of-month
statistics. All the data is now in the sql database.
This point leads to a second advantage. Since the log
traffic is located in a database, I can setup scripts that
generate simple or complex statistical reports for my end-users on
the fly. They won't have to wait for me each month to get
their web traffic information. Additionally, as a system
administrator I can make more complex and exact searches on the
database when I need to look for specific log entries than I could
just using "grep". Also, the module comes with some perl
scripts that allow you to extract the data from the database in a
Combined Log format that you can pipe to your favorite log
analysis tools for more complicated statistical information.
What about reliability?
What it
the SQL server goes down? What about very high traffic
loads? Well, the module has fail-over built-in. If the
Apache server can't get access to the SQL server, it will start
logging the sql insert statements to a text file that you
designate. You can then either automatically or manually
insert the data into the SQL server once you have reestablished a
connection to the SQL server. As far as traffic goes, I have
been running it on my system which generates approximately
thirty-six million hits monthly for over month now with no
problems. I do get occasional entries in the failover file
when the sql server gets very busy, but a simple UNIX cron job
inserts them every night and resets the failover file.
The Bottom Line
There are many other uses and advantages
to using this module, and the bottom line is it gives you greater
flexibility with minimal overhead. Oh yeah, and it's free!
So visit the website and give it a try. If nothing else, you
might learn something.
