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I'm in process of implementing Varnish as a reverse proxy for a Ruby on Rails app and I'm using Google Analytics (JS/client side script to record visitor data) but it's several hours delayed so its useless for knowing what's going on now. I need at a glance live data that includes referring traffic and what current req/sec is. Right now I am using a simple Rack middleware application to do the live stats (gist.github.com/235745) but if the majority of traffic hits Varnish, Rack will never be hit so this won't work.

The closest solution I've found so far is http://www.reinvigorate.net/ but it's in beta (there are also no implementation details on their front page).

Does Varnish have traffic logs that I can custom format to match my Apache logs so I can combine them, or will I have to roll my own JS implementation like GA that shows the data in real time?

3 Answers 3

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Varnish doesn't log for performance reasons. They do allow you to access shm using varnishncsa, however, you do have a few options.

If most of your surfers support javascript (which is how Analytics is doing it's work), you could put a small webbug somewhere on your page that updated a process. Alternatively, you could define a particular image as pass, and then analyze your backend logs since every request would send that request to the backend.

 if (req.url == "^tracker.jpg$") {
    pass
 }

tracker.jpg could easily be a script of some sort to insert data into a local log or you could run log analysis against the backend http webserver's weblogs. If you're using apache:

LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" varnishcombined
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/domain.com-access.log varnishcombined

Will use the X-Forwarded-For header in the column where most log analysis programs are expecting to see the client IP.

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Have a look at varnishncsa, in particular the -c option. It's probably what you want.

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If you want real time info, you should look at the varnishtop and varnishstat commands. Both of these update every second. If you can bear being a few minutes behind you could think about using a charting tool like Monit or Cacti.

See this blog post for an intro to using varnishstat.

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