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Monitor Apache Server

Overview

Apache Server’s monitoring involves monitoring of the following elements:

  • Apache Access Logs
  • Apache Error Logs
  • Apache Server Health
note

The configurations given below apply only to the Apache server running on an instance.

Pre-requisites

  1. Ensure Apache access logs are in format expected by sfAgent parser.

    Edit configuration file , conf file can be /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf, /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/other-vhosts-access-log.conf and set log format as follows:

    LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %D" combined  

    CustomLog "logs/access_log" combined 

    After configuring log format, the expected log entry would be:

    45.112.52.50 - - [28/Jun/2020:23:34:10 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 242 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.106 Safari/537.36" 271  

    Apache configuration file can be found in these paths:

    • Ubuntu: /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/status.conf 
    • Centos: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
  2. Check if Apache status module is enabled

    This is required to monitor Apache server health.

    Apache web server exposes metrics through its status module, mod_status. If apache server is running and mod_status is enabled, apache server’s status page should be available at http://127.0.0.1/server-status.

    Alternatively, you can check is mod_status is enabled by running the following commands:

    Ubuntu(or Debian based systems):

    sudo apache2ctl -M | grep status_module  

    Centos/RHEL/Fedora

    sudo httpd -M | grep status_module  

    if output of above command is status_module , then apache status module is enabled. If mod_status is not enabled , follow next step to enable it.

  3. Enable Apache status module

    In order to enable mod_status ,  edit the status module’s configuration file (on Debian platforms), or your main Apache configuration file (all other Unix-like platforms). 

    Debian users can find the status module’s configuration file in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/status.conf 

    Users of other platforms (such as Red Hat–based systems) will find their main configuration file in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, or /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. 

     In the main configuration file, allow access from local or from a specific ip address as shown below:  

       <Location /server-status>  
           SetHandler server-status 
           Require local 
     #     Require all granted 
           Require ip x.x.x.x 
       </Location> 

    Check your configuration file for errors with the following command:

    apachectl configtest   

    Perform a graceful restart to apply the changes without interrupting live connections:

    (apachectl -k graceful or service apache2 graceful)  

    After enabling mod_status and restarting Apache, status page is accessible at http://localhost/server-status  or http://ipaddress/server-status.

Configuration

sfAgent section provides steps to install and automatically generate plugin configurations. User can also manually add the configuration shown below to config.yaml under /opt/sfagent/ directory

key: <profile key> 
generate_name: true
tags:
Name: <unique instance name or will be generated from IP>
appName: <add application name>
projectName: <add project name>
metrics:
plugins:
- name: apache
enabled: true
interval: 300
config:
port: <apache port number>
secure: false ## while using secured connection set secure flag to true
location: server-status
logging:
plugins:
- name: apache-access
enabled: true
config:
geo_info: true
log_path: /var/log/apache2/access.log, var/log/apache2/access_log
ua_parser: false
- name: apache-error
enabled: true
config:
log_level:
- notice
- warning
- error
log_path: /var/log/apache2/error.log, /var/log/httpd/error_log

Viewing data and dashboards

Data generated by plugin can be viewed in browse data page inside the respective application under plugin=apache and documentType=apache. Logger data is available inside plugin=apache-access with documentType=apacheAccess and plugin=apache-error with documentType=apacheError.

Dashboard for this data can be instantiated by Importing dashboard template Apache_Server and Apache_Access to the application dashboard.