This is a basic question - in the movie "The Social Network" there are several scenes when the young Facebook staff is watching the PHP/Apache server logs on in their TERMINAL in real time.
I'm familiar with how to do this in a RUBY/RoR environment - but with a standard LAMP Apache/PHP environment, how to do actively monitor your server's actions in real time? I'm guessing there's an easy way to do this in Terminal.
If you are looking for a real-time Apache log viewer and analyzer, I would definitely recommend GoAccess.
http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com/
You just run it as (no conf needed):
goaccess -f /var/log/apache2/access.log -s -b
Another thing you can try is the "watch" command which can repetitively run a grep command on any log file you want. Using approriate watch command switches you can even highlight changes in log files in real time.
For example:
watch -d -n5 uptime
GoAccess 0.6.1 should be at least one of the tools in your bag. Open Source. Fast and STABLE.
For Rhel/ Centos 6.4
yum install glib2 glib2-devel glibc make geoip
yum install ncurses-devel
Download GoAccess - http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com/download
Untar it and cd into it
./configure
make
make install
Finally: goaccess -f /var/log/httpd/access.log (or wherever your access logs are [maybe even /etc/httpd/logs/access_log]
This is a basic question - in the movie "The Social Network" there are several scenes when the young Facebook staff is watching the PHP/Apache server logs on in their TERMINAL in real time.
For a large system such as Facebook, you got to wonder how much artistic license (aka bullsh*t) was given in the making of the movie. In an environment with thousands of systems and thousands of clusters, watching server logs scrolling on a terminal is not necessarily the #1 monitoring activity.
In an environment like that (or any production environment with several dozen nodes), you'd have a NOSC of sort with indicators, and only when something is flagged as being in a state of crapping out that one would go and actively look at the logs (probably filtered for significant events and messages.)
Apachetail also provides a real-time view/analysis of Apache logs by connecting directly to your Apache server from a windows desktop app. No software needs to be installed on the Apache server.
you could write a polling script pretty easily, jsut compare the timestamp or the filesize and if changed, do a tail -n1
While I'm thrilled that The Social Network used mostly accurate jargon and terminology, some of the stuff they did just for show.
I'm no server expert but I saw Zuckerberg have a terminal open with a ping command running and I can't think of any reason he would be randomly doing that. (This was after the time that they already had the server up and running).
I did find the Python server hacking scene very amusing though.
Logtool will also make nice colorized logs. Apache can write it's logs to a central NFS server, or can write logs using syslog, and syslog can send the log data to a central syslog server.
Click on the links for more detailed explanations.
You could also use the realtime log viewer in something like LogLogic and filter our what you did not want to see. This way you could collect more than apache logs, you could get router logs, ftp logs, etc.
