Apache Server Log File Issue

Question

I'm a programmer for a company and their server specs are off limits to me due to IT restrictions. I know it's an Apache server running off a Linux environment. I have permissions to add/remove files and to look at the log files for the ones designated to me. In particular I manage an important project on a server and created a program to parse the Apache log file so that I could report statistics based on ips/page requests.

Over the last weekend and this coming week the company has been migrating some of their systems and kind of blundering through the changes because, honestly, it's a lacking IT department and they didn't prepare for the changes nearly as competently as they should have. All of a sudden I'm seeing this in the log file for the server:

ip.ip.ip.ip@ - - [04/May/2015:10:13:43 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 -
ip.ip.ip.ip@ - - [04/May/2015:10:14:13 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 -
ip.ip.ip.ip@ - - [04/May/2015:10:14:43 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 -
ip.ip.ip.ip@ - - [04/May/2015:10:15:13 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 -
ip.ip.ip.ip@ - - [04/May/2015:10:15:43 -0500] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 -

(I've replaced the ip address with ip.ip.ip.ip@)

It's not listed in the log file before the changes began, and to be honest it didn't really bother me except I've now realized that total page views(which is measured by parsing the log file for ".html" within requests on each line) has gone down considerably. This could be because of a couple of different things, but since I just released a new version on the server and it was well received, I don't believe that it's recording properly.

What is this? Does it have anything to do with page requests?

Answer 1

I doubt that the HEAD requests are related to your reduced pageviews.

Like @mschuett said, it looks like a monitoring system of some kind is paging your server every 30 seconds to check that it is responding. That request requires very few resources so it's a good one for basically pinging the server and making sure the http service is responding. It wouldn't case timeouts or much load on the server which is the only way I can think of for it to interrupt pageviews.

So to answer your question as stated, it's probably a monitoring service, and it doesn't really explain why your pageviews are down.

Answer 2

Looks like a simple monitoring system, especially with the fixed 30 sec interval.