Access Logs Viewer – an In-Depth View of Your Web Traffic
An Access Logs Viewer tool like XpoLog features several visual real-time interfaces:
- Manager Interface – where you can add an access log that also contain the Log Viewer
- Search Interface – where you create search queries and get results plus insights to unknown issues
- Analytics Interface – where Analytics results are shown
- Apps Interface – where you can see visual gadgets of all search results.
All of the above assists you with analyzing:
- website hits.
- user’s IP.
- geo / location.
- timestamp.
- and path traveled.
Access log viewer automatically presents a scanned and parsed real-time visual map of resources requested by the servers and detects patterns in:
- HTTP Status codes.
- top URLs.
- hits over time.
- top hits per user.
- number of users over time.
- top countries.
- users GEO IP.
- network usage and more.
With an Access logs viewer, you can search and filter for specific messages, analyze them and improve your website performance and users experience.
Want to get these insights in just a few clicks from now? Download XpoLog7 free
Access logs analysis – let’s dive in!
Access Logs Patterns presents a real-time visual website performance that includes:
- HTTP status codes,
- Top URLs,
- Hits over Time,
- Top hits per user,
- Top hits per client IP,
- Number of users over time,
- Top countries,
- users GEO IP,
- Average Bandwidth (MB) Over Time, etc.
XpoLog has advanced and unique ways in which it analyses logs data and transforms that into insights and action items.
The article access logs analyzer and viewer, presents a high-level picture of log viewer and analyzer.
Now that your XpoLog access logs viewer is configured and starts collecting your data, you need to start filter and search inside the visual access log map.
In this article, you will learn more about access log viewer, and how to perform filter and search queries in the log search interface.
You can also download and see it in your own eyes 🙂
Access Logs Viewer – Query Search Interface
Once the log has been added to your log viewer, you can view it in the log manager interface.
Just click on it in the tree in the left sidebar:
we got a new cool look – check it out! (it’s a beauty)
In the access logs viewer console, you can view single logs.
This is useful for digging down good and deep into particular logs you want to investigate on an intimate level.
Every new log added to XpoLog can be viewed here.
Simultaneously, you can open any number of tabs to view as many logs as you need and easily compare between them.
You can also select a filtered view of your access logs by typing the filter criteria, AKA ‘a search query’, in the text box.
By clicking the filter button, XpoLog viewer will display only the events that satisfy the selected filter.
Access Logs Viewer – Detect Anomalies
Once you’ve added the access log to XpoLog, you can start searching for anomalies.
This is done with the XpoLog log search interface.
XpoLog logs viewer features a Google-like interface to intuitively and quickly search for anomalies and be able to understand how to analyze and fix them.
All you need to do is type your search query (example follows) in the search field and view all anomalies/errors in a various set of graphs, along with lists that are dynamically real-time generated (see below).
Access Logs Viewer – Search Queries
We know that an access log present information about visitors to your website.
The next step would be to search for anomalies in visitors’ interaction w/ your website.
Let’s search for the top users engaging with your website or that have an inordinate number of visits.
That way we can perhaps detect bots traffic or most valuable potential customers and their geo-location.
Along the way, we will see errors occurred during these visits.
The following XpoLog Search query looks for the URLs with the most visits:
*in log.access* | count | group by url | order by count desc
Note – the * sign is an integral part of the search query
In the above screenshot taken from XpoLog logs viewer, we see the heaviest visited pages: Homepage, Download and /logeye/ pages.
Now, lets continue and disregard the Home and the Download pages, and focus on the page with the most visits.
In this case it is the /logeye/ page (XpoLog Access Log Viewer and Manager main page).
In order to drill down into the /logeye/ page, just click on /logeye/ in the table below the graph (marked in red in the screen shot above) and XpoLog Access Log Viewer will automatically create the following search query:
url = “/logeye/” IN log.access*
Also XpoLog Access Logs Viewer will dynamically generate the following view:
We can now see that in June there were 3 HTTP status code errors, 500, 501, and 404 for /logeye/ (internal server error and page not found).
Having these critical errors and anomalies detection at a main business process page is of an utmost importance to a website owner.
Now you are able to zero-in on the root cause analysis (RCA) of these anomalies in the access logs with the below table and XpoLog access log analyzer and fix them before new users will experience the same or additional errors.
Since then, this page has not experienced significant errors, which makes sense considering it is the (3rd) most visited page.
Viewing Access Logs
Now that you have configured and viewed your access log data and had insights about visitors behavior and made several simple filters and search queries to further dig down inside data, XpoLog Analytics interface will assist you further with an even deeper view and analysis of anomalies detection and business process improvements.
To sum up…
an Access Logs Viewer is a tool that can actually show you in real time what is happening with your website by digging down on visitors’ behavior to later understand what’s going on with your business and how you can increase your revenue.
