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While you can always have a peek at Apache log files to get information about your webserver such as active connections, you can get a very detailed overview of your web server’s performance by enabling the mod_status module.
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What is the mod_status module?
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The mod_status module is an Apache module that allows users to access highly detailed information about Apache’s performance on a plain HTML page. In fact, Apache maintains its own server status page for general public viewing.
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You can view status for Apache (Ubuntu) by heading over to the address below:
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The Apache mod_status makes it possible to serve a plain HTML page containing information such as:
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- Server version
- Current day and time in UTC
- Server Uptime
- Server load
- Total traffic
- Total number of incoming requests
- The webserver’s CPU usage
- PIDs with the respective clients and so much more.
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Let’s now shift gears and see how you can get up-to-date statistics about Apache web server.
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Testing Environment
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Operating System: tUbuntu 20.04rnApplication: Apache HTTP serverrnVersion: 2.4.41rnIP address: 34.123.9.111rnDocument root: /var/www/htmlrn
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Enable mod_status in Apache Ubuntu
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By default, Apache ships with the mod_status module already enabled. You can verify this by checking the mods_enabled directory by running ls command as shown:
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$ ls /etc/apache2/mods-enabledrn
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Ensure that the status.conf and status.load files are present. If not, you need to enable mod_status module by invoking the command:
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$ sudo /usr/sbin/a2enmod statusrn
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Configure mod_status in Apache Ubuntu
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As stated earlier, the mod_status is already enabled. However, additional tweaks are required for you to access the server-status page. To do so, you need to modify the status.conf file.
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$ sudo vim /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/status.conf rn
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Set the Require ip directive to reflect the IP address of the machine that you will be accessing the server from.
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Save the changes and restart Apache for the changes to take effect to confirm the status as shown:
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$ sudo systemctl restart apache2rn
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Then verify the status of Apache and ensure it up and running.
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$ sudo systemctl status apache2rn
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Thereafter, browse the web server’s URL as shown.
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http://server-ip/server-statusrn
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You will get a status HTML page displaying a host of Apache’s information and an array of statistics as shown.
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NOTE: To have the page refresh after every a given time interval, for example, 5 seconds, append the “?refresh=5” at the end of the URL.
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http://server-ip/server-status?refresh=5rn
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This provides a better monitoring capacity of your server’s performance than the plain static HTML page earlier on.
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That’s all for now about the mod_status module. Stay Tuned to Tecmint for so much more.
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