Installing Awstats and optionally Maxthreads

The frontier-awstats package collects statistics from frontier-squid log files and sends them to the central monitoring server four times an hour. The statistics are very useful for analyzing what's happening on the squid, especially where traffic is coming from. It is only used on centrally managed squids, not on per-site squids. It also collects statistics from httpd logs, if the wlcg-squid-monitor is configured to receive them. Here are the Release Notes of the rpm.

This document also describes installation of another package called frontier-maxthreads that is often used on the same machines and which collects statistics from frontier-tomcat log files. Here are the Release Notes of that rpm.

Preparation

No preparation is necessary.

frontier-awstats uses the same user and group ids as the frontier-squid package and in fact its operation is invoked by the frontier-squid cron script when analyzing squid logs. When analyzing httpd logs, it is invoked as root by its own cron.

frontier-maxthreads runs as root and is invoked by its own cron.

Installation

If you haven't installed anything from the cern-frontier yum repository, enable it with this command:

    # rpm -Uvh http://frontier.cern.ch/dist/rpms/RPMS/noarch/frontier-release-1.1-1.noarch.rpm

If installing only frontier-awstats, as root run the following command to install:

    # yum install frontier-awstats

If installing both frontier-awstats and frontier-maxthreads, instead run the following command:

    # yum install frontier-maxthreads

Configuration

Edit /etc/awstats/password-file with a password you want to use to authenticate on the monitoring server. Make the owner the same as that used by frontier-squid (default "squid") and make it mode 600. Tell the password you chose to the administrator of the monitoring server, along with the site name and machine name or preferred alias.

Configuration of the installation is automatic, once the central monitoring server is configured.

frontier-maxthreads uses the same password from the awstats package but uploads its data to frontier.cern.ch instead of wlcg-squid-monitor.cern.ch.

Testing

If there is at least one transaction in the log, for example made by the InstallSquidForLaunchpad Testing instructions, and the monitoring server is configured correctly, within one hour there should be some statistics showing up on the monitoring server. The links to the awstats pages are on the monitoring server homepage.

Maxthreads data should show up on a one of the pages linked from the frontier home page within five minutes.

Debugging

Once the first connection has been successfully made after the monitoring server is set up, the file /etc/awstats/awstatsconf should be automatically created. Error messages go to a log file called squidcron.log in the same directory as other squid logs (default /var/log/squid), because the squid hourly cron job invokes the awstats statistics generation script. Error messages for httpd awstats go into /var/log/awstatscron.log. On the monitoring server, rsync connections are logged in /var/log/messages.

Maxthreads log information goes to /var/log/maxthreads.log.

Responsible: DaveDykstra