In this article I’ll be reviewing how to use Apache access logs on either your VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server in order to determine the types of requests your website is handling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lot of times the usage on your server can be greatly affected by the types of requests that are happening on your websites, if you’ve read either of my previous articles on how to do advanced server load monitoring<\/a>, or you’ve setup a server load monitoring script<\/a> you might be aware that your server’s load average has been recently spiking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve already covered determining the cause of a server usage spike<\/a> which goes over taking a particular load spike’s time stamp and correlating that with your Apache access logs, and I’ve also gone over how to view the level of traffic with Apache access logs<\/a> which lets you view the hits per day, per hour, and per minute to your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this article I’ll be going over different types of requests that show up in your Apache access logs. More specifically the request type, requested URL, and response codes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To follow along with the instructions in this article you’ll need to have either a VPS or dedicated server so that you can SSH into the server<\/a> to run the commands we’ll go over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this example our domain is example.com<\/strong> and the cPanel username is userna5<\/strong>. You can run the following command to get to the \/access-logs<\/strong> directory for that user:<\/p>\n\n\n\nView Types of Requests from Apache Access Log<\/h2>\n\n\n\n