aptop 0.4.0

ApTop is top like clone for Apache

ApTop

ApTop ia a top(1) alike monitoring utility for Apache.

Being daily involved in monitoring system load in shared environment I find it lacking proper tool for monitoring Apache behavior in real time. Granted there are some tools for this job, they are usually of limited options for some monitoring needs.

ApTop was written as a hobby project in python for debugging purposes while investigating several system load situations caused by web applications in shared hosting environment.

ApTop is still an early beta release with some known bugs, nevertheless it still provides a great starting point in monitoring Apache. Every feedback and feature request at this point is more than welcomed.

Description

ApTop will show near real time Apache active working processes and virtual host connections. By default sleeping / waiting for connections slots will be filtered out.

ApTop is also displaying several screens

Dashboard or Home screen

This screen displays some relevant informations gathered from apache-status_ page.

Default sorting is by shortest Apache access time SS and it displays only active connections. Displayed fields are the same as in server-status page, so you can find detailed explanation for their meaning at the bottom of server-status page.

Displayed fields are:

• PID - OS process ID
• M - Mode of operation
• CPU - CPU usage, number of seconds
• SS - Seconds since beginning of most recent request<
• Req - Milliseconds required to process most recent request
• Conn - Kilobytes transferred this connection
• Acc - Number of accesses this connection / this child / this slot
• Client - Remote client
• VHost - Local virtualhost
• Request - Request method and partial URL

Count by vhosts screen

This screen displays virtualhosts in order by highest count of active connections along with connection count.

Very useful for detecting high traffic sites.

Count by clients screen

This screen displays clients in order by highest count of active connections along with connection count.

Very useful for detecting resource exhauster.

Requirements

ApTop should work just fine on any Unix based system with Python standard packages and lxml.

Make sure you have libxml2 libxslt libxslt-devel libxml2-devel packages instaleld prior to building lxml:

For RHEL based distro you can install those with

yum install libxml2 libxslt libxslt-devel libxml2-devel

After that you can installlxml Python package with

pip install lxml

ApTop is using Apaches mod_status with ExtendedStatus On for gathering data.

Please ensure that mod_status is enabled and proper status url is defined in aptop.conf

Installation

These installation options are for RHEL based distros, adjust accordingly.

yum install libxml2 libxslt libxslt-devel libxml2-devel python-setuptools

pip install  ApTop

You can now run aptop.py

Configuration

ApTop has some built in default configuration directives, but it will also look first in ~/.aptop.conf and then /etc/aptop.conf for overrides.

ApTop uses .ini style configuration files and main configuration options should be placed after [aptop] section.

By default ApTop will use http://localhost/server-status URL for grabbing data to display, and with default refresh rate of 5 seconds.

Available configuration options

status_url = URL

This configuration option will require you to enter valid mod_status status URL for server you wish to monitor. This defaults to http://localhost/server-status Note that Apache should have ExtendedStatus conf option set to On

refresh = seconds

This option will control ApTop default refresh interval. It defaults to 5 seconds and can't be lower than 1 second.

You can even monitor the remote systems if they granted you access rights to theirs server-status URL. In the future ApTop will provide options to save remote monitored servers to its configuration.

Runtime options

While running ApTop responds to following options:

• H - display main screen
• V - display vhosts by conn. count
• C - display clients by conn. count
• U - display count by url
• R - reverse the current sort order
• I - toggle active/inactive slots
• D - change the refresh rate
• O - change sort field
• M - filter methods