I'm baffled

V

volk

New Member
#1
#1
I installed Open LiteSpeed to test and play with latest version and to be honest I'm baffled with something in particular.

I searched for 1 hour in the GUI and Googled for another where it was because I can't believe something like this is not build in.

Where exactly do you see the connections coming into the web server?

The admin panel just shows numbers, completely useless. With Apache Mod Status you can see the IP's, the URL's, the POST or GET parameter, the domain, etc.

Just to discard this is a bug in the software or my install, I then launched a Droplet in Digital Ocean, installed a new software and same thing. All you can see are numbers for the requests per second and well, just that. Nothing more. Just numbers and the graphs that go draw in the screen, dots, that show the time and nothing more.

How exactly is this useful if you cannot actually see which users are connected to a webserver and which end url's they are hitting?

So I came to one conclusion. If you can't actually see that, then Litespeed is not only inferior to Apache (and any other web server since all of them have this) but insecure, as not having such data available would not let you integrate external scanning systems or have granular data on what users are actually hitting on a server and from where they are coming. Mod Status is already very limited and basic, but at least the information is important for devops and systems admins. LiteSpeed has nice configuration buttons here and there but the most important thing of all is not anywhere to be found. Monitoring traffic. Maybe its a separated plugin or I didn't enabled something?

What kind of black magic I have to do in order to enable this feature?

The best I got was finding some Google Images about an older version, in that version there is a Details link and it seems you can click for more stats for specific vhosts stats. I assume this is where you can see such data (not sure why you can't per server wide) but those options don't seems to be anywhere at all in the latest version. Again. The best you can see is fancy numbers about the incoming requests and hits. Nothing more. Not a single IP. Not a single URL, not a single POST or GET parameter. Nothing. Completely blinded on what traffic is coming into the server.

This is exactly what I'm talking about:
https://www.apache.org/server-status

Apache is ugly but you can clearly see every single hit and request coming into the server, including the request used and status of each connection.
 
K

KevinFwu

Administrator
Staff member
#2
#2
Hi Volk,

An access log viewer is available in the LSWS Enterprise web admin, but not yet available in the OLS web admin. We will note the request for this feature.

In the mean time, aside from the real time stats page, there is an access log available at the server level in $SERVER_ROOT/logs/access.log. A specific virtual host's access log is configurable. The default is using its own log file, default location is $VH_ROOT/logs/access.log.

Hope this helps,
Kevin
 
V

volk

New Member
#3
#3
I see, but access logs are different animals. You could pipe it externally, but the purpose of something like mod status or any status dashboard is not to log data but just see live non persistent details for quick diagnostics.

Does the log viewer you mention in the Enterprise edition has such data available for admins? Any screenshots on what is available? I can't find any info about this, not even for the enterprise edition.

If you mean this:
https://www.litespeedtech.com/docs/webserver/admin/service#viewlog

This is not what I was looking. I don't need to see the access or error logs but live data hitting the vhosts. From where (IP), what condition they are (closing, active), how long, which end url they hit, which parameters (GET, POST).

Yes, you can see that in the access log as well and you surely could tail that but I suspect something like this was the main purpose of having a web admin interface. Otherwise I'm not sure what the point is, as editing config files with a text editor is already faster and preferred than a click and point GUI. Usually web admin GUI's have graphics and other metrics which are not available from the command line or are hard to read in text mode.

This was actually the first thing I started to search when I logged in, not even bothering with the configuration settings. I'm a bit surprised this is actually not available.
 
V

volk

New Member
#5
#5
Exactly, that is what I was looking. Thank you for that.

That is only available in the Enterprise edition correct? I was sure to read the comparison page several times but was not aware that stuff like this is missing in the other licenses. This may seem like a small thing but its a big deal for me.
 
K

KevinFwu

Administrator
Staff member
#6
#6
Yes, this is an enterprise only feature.

We've noted this feature request for OLS, but do not have a time table for when this will be available.
 
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