Web Server Activity

Your Zeus server records logs of activity. You can examine these records using the Activity Monitor on your admin server, drilling down through an overview of downloads over the last 24 hours or 7 days to investigate the most active host headers on a single virtual server.

Each Zeus webserver talks to its local zeus.statd, informing it of its current activity. You can enable or disable this logging for individual virtual servers by enabling or disabling the mod_stats module. The local zeus.statd process records the activity in log files - virtual server, host header, hits and bytes transferred. The log files are stored in $ZEUSHOME/web/log/statd and are deleted or archived once they reach a certain age.

The Activity Monitor is completely cluster-aware (with several caveats), and can query the logs of all the machines in your cluster simultaneously.


For Example ...

Joe Webmaster runs a webserver farm of three machines; Samson, Goliath and Hercules. Goliath runs his admin server, and so appears as 'localhost' in his statistics reporting.

Samson and Goliath are not as powerful as Hercules, so his Zeus load-balancer compensates for this by directing more traffic to Hercules. Moreover, Samson was offline for some time several days ago.

He wants to know why his webservers are busy, so he drills down to look at the virtual servers running on Hercules:

His server farm is only running three virtual servers. 'Development' and 'Intranet' are relatively inactive. 'Customers' is handling a number of customer websites (using the Zeus subserver module), so he examines the host headers active on this virtual server.

www.saturn.com is clearly the most active website on his server farm.


Cluster Caveats

The Activity Monitor is cluster aware, with several restrictions. These restrictions do not apply if you only have one machine in your cluster, or have no clusters configured.


Notes