TinyLogAnalyzer 0.4.0

Command line utility for perform response time analysis onto HTTP access logs

Table of contents

• Introduction

  • Seconds and microsends

• How to use

• Results

  • Top total time

  • Top average time

• TODO

• Changelog

  • 0.4.0 (2011-10-04)

  • 0.3.0 (2011-06-23)

  • 0.2.2 (2011-05-02)

  • 0.2.1 (2011-04-29)

  • 0.2.0 (2011-04-28)

  • 0.1.0 (2011-04-27)

Introduction

This project adds to your system a new utility command: tinylogan. This utility only works with Apache-like access HTTP log where the response time data is enabled.

To know how to do this, see this blog post or, in brief change the configuration of your log format from something like:

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

To this:

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

The log record will change to something like this:

[31/Jan/2008:14:19:07 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 7918 ""
... "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.11 (Ubuntu-feisty)" 0/95491

Seconds and microsends

The utility only cares about microsends (%D) so you need to have Apache 2.

How to use

Here the complete help:

Usage: tinylogan [options] logfile

Simple bash utility for analyze HTTP access log with enabled response time

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         verbose output during log analysis
  -s SIZE, --size=SIZE  choose the number of record to store in every log
  -q, --keep-query      keep query strings in URLs instead of cutting them.
                        Using this an URL with different query string is treat
                        like different URLs.
  -i INCLUDE_REGEX, --include=INCLUDE_REGEX
                        a regexp expression that an URLs must match of will be
                        discarded. Can be called multiple times, expanding the
                        set
  -e EXCLUDE_REGEX, --exclude=EXCLUDE_REGEX
                        a regexp expression that an URLs must not match of
                        will be discarded. Can be called multiple times,
                        reducing the set
  --skip-day=SKIP_DAY   A regexp that repr specific whole day or a set of
                        dates that must be ignored. Can be called multiple
                        times
  --min-time=MIN_TIME_MILLIS
                        ignore all entries that require less than this amount
                        of millisecs
  --max-time=MAX_TIME_MILLIS
                        ignore all entries that require more than this amount
                        of millisecs
  --min-times=MIN_TIMES
                        set a minimum number of times that a entry must be
                        found to be used in the "Top average time" statistic

  Date filters:
    For those kind of filters you need to specify a date. You are free to
    use a specific date in the format dd/mmm/aaaa, like "24/May/2011", but
    also some keywords for relative date like "today", "yesterday",
    "tomorrow", "week" and "month". Use of "week" and "month" mean
    referring to first day of the current week or month. You can also
    provide a numerical modifier using "+" or "-" followed by a day
    quantity (example: "week-5" for going back of 5 days from the start of
    the week).

    --start-date=START_DATE
                        date where to start analyze and record
    --end-date=END_DATE
                        date where to end analyze and record

  Time filters:
    When a time is needed, you must enter it in the format hh:mm:ss or
    simply hh:mm, like "09:21:30" or "09:21". Those filter are used for
    skip record that are registered "too late at night" or "too early in
    the morning".

    --skip-timeperiod-start=SKIP_TIME_START
                        do not analyse records before the given time
    --skip-timeperiod-end=SKIP_TIME_END
                        do not analyse records later the given time

  Default configuration profiles:
    You can read a set of default configuration options from a
    ".tinylogan" file placed in the user's home directory. If this file is
    found, parameters from the "DEFAULT" section are read, but you can
    also add other sections. You can always override those options from
    the command line.

    -c PROFILE          read a different profile section than DEFAULT
    -U                  Ignore the user default profile file (if exists)
    --example-profile   Print out an example profile file, then exit. You can
                        put this output in a ".tinylogan" file in your home,
                        then customize it

You can also configure your defaults values in a .tinylogan config file placed in your user’s home. Read help above for details.

Results

Let explain the given results:

Starting from 15/Apr/2011:08:19:06
enough... stopped by user action
Ending at 28/Apr/2011:17:00:36
Elapsed time: 0:00:04.955008
Timedelta is 13 days, 8:41:30 (but only 7 days, 9:41:30 are counted due to time bounds)

Top total time
  0001 - /url1 46591.603 (4924 times, average 9.462, 7.28% of the total)
  0002 - /url2 12660.053 (1212 times, average 10.446, 1.98% of the total)
  ...

Top average time
  0001 - /url3 32.828 (15 times, 492 total)
  0002 - /url4 30.549 (7 times, 213 total)
  ...

Starting from ...

First valid entry found in the log

enough... stopped by user action

Only if you CTRL+C during the log analysis. This will stop the log scan and skip to results immediatly

Ending at ...

Last entry analyzed

Elapsed time: ...

Time required for the log analysis

Timedelta is ...

Number of days from the first and last entry of the log, important for giving to the users a percent of the total time taken from an entry.

If you use some of the time filters above the used value for the statistic is the one given in the sentence but only xxx are counted due to time bounds.

Top total time

This will show, from the most consuming time to the less ones, a hierarchy of the URLs that take the most time from the analyzed log:

        Total number of seconds taken
                     |                    Average time per call
Entry position       |                             |
      |              |                             |
     0001 - /url1 46591.603 (4924 times, average 9.462, 7.28% of the total)
              |               |                          |
       URL of the entry       |                          |
                              |             Percentage of the total time
                         Times called

Top average time

This will show, from the most slow entry to the less ones, a hierarchy of the URLs that seems slowest, considering the average time per hit.

Note that you could like to use the --min-times option for have a better statiscal report for this. Without giving this option, a on-time call to a very slow procedure will probably be reported in this hierarchy, even if it will not give you a good average data.

Let’s details:

     Average number of seconds taken
                    |
Entry position      |         Total time in seconds
      |             |                  |
     0001 - /url3 32.828 (15 times, 492 total)
              |              |
       URL of the entry      |
                             |
                        Times called

TODO

• a way to ignore min and max values from multiple occurrences of a match

• right now all records are stored in memory… obviously this is not the way to parse a potentially multiple-gigabyte-long-file

• a way to recognize default views (like: that foo/other_foo is the same as foo/other_foo/index.html)

• right now the log is read from the first line. In this way reaching a far-from-first entry, when using the --start-date is used, can be really slow

Changelog

0.4.0 (2011-10-04)

• when error happens during log analysis, report the error line number

• fixed severe bug in the month array, that simply make this script useless for everything after August

• use the python logging module for handle error and verbosity; this clean the output a little

• log a warning if encounter a line that doesn’t match the log format

• added week and month date filters

• added quantity modifiers to date filters

• fixed documentation help

• added the new skip-day filter

• implemented users default profiles and added related options

• do not continue log analysis when the --end-date is found

• the --include option was buggy. Now using it more than once will include additional URLs to the set

0.3.0 (2011-06-23)

• added “Elapsed time” report

• added --verbose option

• added a way to skip records if they require too little, or too much time

• handled keyboard interrupt (CTRL+C); the first one will simply stop the log analysis while the second terminate the process

• added the --min-times option, to control when an entry must be in the “Top average time” statistic

• more complete documentation

0.2.2 (2011-05-02)

• incredibly, I forgot a month: May was missing!

0.2.1 (2011-04-29)

• descriptions of --skip-timeperiod-start and -skip-timeperiod-end were inverted

• URLs to the root page (”/”) were transformed to empty strings

• reveted changes that automatically change space in a %20 for filters (not a good idea for something that must be a valid regexp)

0.2.0 (2011-04-28)

• pep8 cleanup

• URLs with trailing / now are collected has the same as URLs without /

• filters with spaces chars are now handled as %20

• added -q option, for not merging anymore URLs different only in query string

0.1.0 (2011-04-27)

• initial release