As promised in our earlier tutorials of Apache Series, Today we are here with another article on the Apache HTTP web server which can make a System Administrators life much easier to handle load of Apache web server using mod_status module.
What is mod_status?
mod_status is an Apache module which helps to monitor web server load and current httpd connections with an HTML interface which can be accessible via a web browser.
Apache’s mod_status shows a plain HTML page containing the information about current statistics of web server state including.
- Total number of incoming requests
- Total number of bytes and counts server
- CPU usage of Web server
- Server Load
- Server Uptime
- Total Traffic
- Total number of idle workers
- PIDs with respective client and many more.
The default Apache Project enabled their server statistics page to the general public. To have a demo of busy web site’s status page, visit.
Testing Environment
We have used following Testing Environment for this article to explore more about mod_status with some practical examples and screen-shots.
- Operating System – CentOS 6.5
- Application – Apache Web Server
- IP Address – 5.175.142.66
- DocumentRoot– /var/www/html
- Apache Configuration file – /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf (for Red Hat)
- Default HTTP Port – 80 TCP
- Test Configuration Settings – httpd -t
The prerequisites for this tutorial is that you should already aware how to install and configure a Basic Apache Server. If you don’t know how to setup Apache, read the following article that might help you in setting up your own Apache Web Server.
How to Enable mod_status in Apache
The default Apache installation comes with mod_status enabled. If not, make sure to enable it in Apache configuration file at.
[root@elakhost ~]# vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Search for the word “mod_status” or keep scrolling down until you find a line containing.
#LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so
If you see a ‘#‘ character at the beginning of “LoadModule”, that means mod_status is disabled. Remove the ‘#‘ to enable mod_status.
LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so
Configure mod_status
Now again search for the word “Location” or scroll down until you find a section for mod_status which should look like following.
# Allow server status reports generated by mod_status, # with the URL of http://servername/server-status # Change the ".example.com" to match your domain to enable. # #<Location /server-status> # SetHandler server-status # Order deny,allow # Deny from all # Allow from .example.com #</Location>
In the above section, uncomment the lines for Location directive, SetHandler and the directory restrictions according to your needs. For example, I am keeping it simple with the Order Allow, deny and it’s allowed for all.
<Location /server-status> SetHandler server-status Order allow,deny Deny from all Allow from all </Location>
Note : The above configuration is the default configuration for default Apache web site (single website). If you’ve created one or more Apache Virtual Hosts, the above configuration will won’t work.
So, basically, you need to define the same configuration for each virtual host for any domains you’ve configured in Apache. For example, the virtual host configuration for mod_status will look like this.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin elakhost@example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example.com
ServerName example.com
ErrorLog logs/example.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/example.com-access_log common
<Location /server-status>
SetHandler server-status
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Allow from example.com
</Location>
</VirtualHost>
Enable ExtendedStatus
The “ExtendedStatus” settings adds more information to the statistics page like, CPU usage, request per second, total traffic, etc. To enable it, edit the the same httpd.conf file and search for the word “Extended” and Uncomment the line and set the status “On” for ExtendedStatus directive.
# ExtendedStatus controls whether Apache will generate "full" status # information (ExtendedStatus On) or just basic information (ExtendedStatus # Off) when the "server-status" handler is called. The default is Off. # ExtendedStatus On
Restart Apache
Now make sure that you’ve correctly enabled and configured Apache server status page. You can also check for the errors in the httpd.conf configuration using following command.
[root@elakhost ~]# httpd -t Syntax OK
Once, you get syntax is OK, you can able to restart the httpd service.
[root@elakhost ~]# service httpd restart Stopping httpd: [ OK ] Starting httpd: [ OK ]
Access mod_status Page
The Apache status page will be accessible via your domain name with “/server-status” at the following URL’s.
http://serveripaddress/server-status OR http://serev-hostname/server-status
In above Snapshot, you can see that an HTML interface, which shows all information about server uptime, process Id with its respective client, the page they are trying to access.
It also shows the meaning and usage of all the abbreviations used to display the status which helps us to understand the situation better.
You can also refresh the page every time seconds (say 5 seconds) to see the updated statistics. To set the automate refresh, please add “?refresh=N” at the end of the URL. Where N can be replaced with the number of seconds which you want your page to get refreshed.
http://serveripaddress/server-status/?refresh=5
Command line Status Page View
You can also view the Apache status page from the command-line interface using the special command-line browsers called links or lynx. You can install them using default package manager utility called yum as shown below.
# yum install links OR # yum install lynx
Once, you’ve installed the, you can get the same statistics on your terminal by using following command.
[root@elakhost ~]# links http://serveripaddress/server-status OR [root@elakhost ~]# lynx http://serveripaddress/server-status OR [root@elakhost ~]# /etc/init.d/httpd fullstatus
Sample Output
Apache Server Status for localhost Server Version: Apache/2.2.15 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.3.3 Server Built: Aug 13 2013 17:29:28 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Current Time: Tuesday, 14-Jan-2014 04:34:13 EST Restart Time: Tuesday, 14-Jan-2014 00:33:05 EST Parent Server Generation: 0 Server uptime: 4 hours 1 minute 7 seconds Total accesses: 2748 - Total Traffic: 9.6 MB CPU Usage: u.9 s1.06 cu0 cs0 - .0135% CPU load .19 requests/sec - 695 B/second - 3658 B/request 1 requests currently being processed, 4 idle workers .__.__W... Scoreboard Key: "_" Waiting for Connection, "S" Starting up, "R" Reading Request, "W" Sending Reply, "K" Keepalive (read), "D" DNS Lookup, "C" Closing connection, "L" Logging, "G" Gracefully finishing, "I" Idle cleanup of worker, "." Open slot with no current process Srv PID Acc M CPU SS Req Conn Child Slot Client VHost Request 0-0 - 0/0/428 . 0.30 5572 0 0.0 0.00 1.34 127.0.0.1 5.175.142.66 OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 GET 1-0 5606 0/639/639 _ 0.46 4 0 0.0 2.18 2.18 115.113.134.14 5.175.142.66 /server-status?refresh=5 HTTP/1.1 GET 2-0 5607 0/603/603 _ 0.43 0 0 0.0 2.09 2.09 115.113.134.14 5.175.142.66 /server-status?refresh=5 HTTP/1.1 3-0 - 0/0/337 . 0.23 5573 0 0.0 0.00 1.09 127.0.0.1 5.175.142.66 OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 GET 4-0 5701 0/317/317 _ 0.23 9 0 0.0 1.21 1.21 115.113.134.14 5.175.142.66 /server-status?refresh=5 HTTP/1.1 GET 5-0 5708 0/212/213 _ 0.15 6 0 0.0 0.85 0.85 115.113.134.14 5.175.142.66 /server-status?refresh=5 HTTP/1.1 6-0 5709 0/210/210 W 0.16 0 0 0.0 0.84 0.84 127.0.0.1 5.175.142.66 GET /server-status HTTP/1.1 7-0 - 0/0/1 . 0.00 5574 0 0.0 0.00 0.00 127.0.0.1 5.175.142.66 OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Srv Child Server number - generation PID OS process ID Acc Number of accesses this connection / this child / this slot 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 Child Megabytes transferred this child Slot Total megabytes transferred this slot -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Server at localhost Port 80
Conclusion
Apache’s mod_status module is a very handy monitoring tool for monitoring performance of a web server’s activity and can able to highlight problems itself. For more information read the status page that can be help you to become a more successful web server administrator.
That’s all for mod_status for now, we’ll come up with some more tricks and tips on Apache in future tutorials. Till then stay Geeky and tuned to elakhost.com and don’t forget to add your valuable comments.
