APacheDEX 1.1

Compute APDEX from Apache-style logs.

Contents

• Overview

• What APacheDEX is not

• Requirements

  • Dependencies

  • Input

  • Output

• Usage

• Notes

Compute APDEX from Apache-style logs.

Overview

Parses Apache-style logs and generates several statistics intended for a website developer audience:

• APDEX (Application Performance inDEX, see http://www.apdex.org) ratio (plotted)

  Because you want to know how satisfied your users are.

• hit count (plotted)

  Because achieving 100% APDEX is easy when there is nobody around.

• HTTP status codes, with optional detailed output of the most frequent URLs per error status code, along with their most frequent referers

  Because your forgot to update a link to that conditionally-used browser compatibility javascript you renamed.

• Hottest pages (pages which use rendering time the most)

  Because you want to know where to invest time to get highest user experience improvement.

• ERP5 sites: per-module statistics, with module and document views separated

  Because module and document types are not born equal in usage patterns.

Some parsing performance figures:

On a 2.3Ghz Corei5, apachedex achieves 97000 lines/s ( pypy-c-jit-62994-bd32583a3f11-linux64) and 43000 lines/s (CPython 2.7).

What APacheDEX is not

APacheDEX does not produce website audience statistics like AWStats, Google Analytics (etc) could do.

APacheDEX does not monitor website availability & resource usage like Zabbix, Cacti, Ganglia, Nagios (etc) could do.

Requirements

Dependencies

As such, apachedex has no dependencies outside of standard python 2.7 installation. But generated output needs a few javascript files which come from other projects:

• jquery.js

• jquery.flot.js

• jquery.flot.time.js (official flot plugin)

• jquery.flot.axislabels.js (third-party flot plugin)

If you installed apachedex (using an egg or with a distribution’s package) you should have them already. If you are running from repository, you need to fetch them first:

python setup.py deps

Input

All default “combined” log format fields are supported (more can easily be added), plus %D.

Mandatory fields are (in any order) %t, %r (for request’s URL), %>s, %{Referer}i, %D. Just tell apachedex the value from your apache log configuration (see –logformat argument documentation).

Input files may be provided gzip’ed.

Output

The output is HTML + CSS + JS, so you need a web browser to read it.

Usage

A few usage examples. See embedded help (-h/–help) for further options.

Most basic usage:

apachedex --default website access.log

Generate stand-alone output (suitable for inclusion in a mail, for example):

apachedex --default website --js-embed access.log --out attachment.html

A log file with requests for 2 websites for which individual stats are desired, and hits outside those base urls are ignored:

apachedex --base /site1 /site2

A log file with a site section to ignore. Order does not matter:

apachedex --skip-base /ignored --default website

A mix of both above examples. Order matters !:

apachedex --skip-base /site1/ignored --base /site1 /site2

Notes

When there are no hits for more than a graph period, placeholders are generated for 0 hit (which is the reality) and 100% apdex (this is arbitrary). Those placeholders only affect graphs, and do not affect averages nor table content.