Log files (or ‘logs’) of a web server are text files stored in the same one in which the log HTTP access requests to any server resource (pages, images, scripts, etc.): in short, they are a record of all traffic.
Each of its lines can have looks similar to the followingwith information about the ‘user agent’, source IP, destination URL and date of access:
11.222.333.44 – – [11/Dec/2021:11:02:33 –0600] “GET /blog/presentation.html HTTP/1.1” 200 182 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/60.0.3112.113”
But when what we are interested in is not each individual line, but the traffic patterns and/or the flow of visits that the server is receiving live, we need a good log viewing tool. And this is where it comes in one of the most interesting in this category: Logstalgia.
A different way to view HTTP request logs
Logstalgia is a website log viewing tool that presents (playing back or ‘broadcasting’ in real time) the accesses to it in a way that is as informative as it is visually stimulating: as if it were a vintage video game of Pong or shooter.
Access requests are shown to us as colored balls (same color as host) that cross the screen until they reach the requested location: The ones that reach their destination (which can be a URL or a global tag, like ‘images’) end up hitting, while the ones that fail (like 404 errors) go off the opposite edge of the screen.
For example, a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against our server, executed via a botnet, would look very similar to this (data shows a DDoS attack on the web media player VLC):
Logstalgia is compatible with the main standardized log formats used by the two most widely used web server software on the Internet (Nginx and Apache), but, according to their website, we will need to have a fairly busy web server (from 100 requests per minute) to achieve interesting results when we use it in real time.
Thus, to reproduce a log, a command as simple as this is enough:
logstalgia data/example.log
…while to view the log results in real time we will have to use (in the case of Unix systems) a command similar to this:
tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | loggia –sync
Remember that Logstalgia is ‘open source’ software that is available (on its website and/or in distribution repositories) to be installed on Windows, mac OS, Linux and *BSD systems.