John Herren’s Blog

Typically if you need to monitor Apache, you have to rely on log file analysis or the built in server-status tool via mod_status. I wanted something better to monitor all the hosts on my web cluster.

Now that I’ve got realtime Apache log consolidation working, I found a cool utility in Theo Schlossnagle’s book, Scalable Internet Architectures that let’s you see realtime response code stats for your web cluster. I call the thing wwwtop.

The output looks like this, using the first four hosts with a one-second interval:

Looks like I’ve got some 404’s to hunt down.

Some To-dos:

• pretty aggregate output, similar to mytop.
• a version to monitor APC stats the same way

Combined with top, vmstat, bmon, mytop, and now this, I’ve got a complete toolkit for monitoring the web stack.